“Yes, she does. I’d no idea she had so much decision,” and Miss Elinor’s scissors cut quite a hole in the embroidery on which she has worked ever since we knew her. “I remonstrated when she told me she should return an affirmative answer, but it did no good. She never intended long to burden people on whom she had no claim, she said. She would rather be independent, and though she was very happy here, she felt it her duty to earn her own living, now that an opportunity was presented.” “Earn her own living,” repeated Mr. Howland, “just as though she cost anybody anything. There is some other reason, and if I didn’t know you as well as I do, I should be inclined to think the fault was with you. Maybe you do sometimes scold her, Elinor?” and he fixed his eyes inquiringly upon his sister’s face. Miss Elinor had striven hard to restrain the tears which thoughts of parting with her favorite induced, and thus far she had succeeded, but when she heard her brother’s remark, they burst forth at once. “_Me_ scold Alice?” was all she could articulate, as with a deeply injured air she left the room, while her brother, seizing his hat, hurried off to the store, where he remained the entire day, trying to think how it would seem to him when he knew that Alice was gone. _It didn’t seem at all_, either to him or to his clerks, for never before had he been so irritable and cross, finding fault with the most trivial matters; chiding the cash-boy for moving too fast, and the head clerk for moving too slow; refusing to trust the widow Simpson, whom he had trusted all his life, and making himself so generally disagreeable that the young men in his employ were not sorry when, about five o’clock, they saw him start for home. “I’m glad he’s gone, anyway, dern him!” muttered Check, who had been, perhaps, the greatest sufferer, and with a most contemptuous whistle he looked after the retreating figure of his master. Alice was not in the yard—nor in the parlor—nor in the house. He knew it by that indefinable feeling which we experience when the one we love the best is absent. “She had gone to walk by the river,” Miss Elinor said, when questioned, asking him in the same breath why he didn’t come home to dinner. “I was not hungry,” he replied. “The prospect of losing Alice has taken my appetite away. Do you think she would stay with us, if I were to adopt her as my daughter?”