“A perfect angel of sweetness,” Mrs. Burton called her, and no person was tolerated who did not tacitly, at least, accord to Georgie all the virtues it was possible for one woman to possess. The relations between Maude and Georgie were kind and friendly, but not at all familiar or intimate. Georgie was too reserved and reticent with regard to herself and her affairs to admit of her being on very confidential terms with any one, and so Maude knew very little of her real character, and nothing whatever of her life before she came to live with her aunt, except what she learned from Mrs. Burton, who sometimes talked of her only sister, Georgie’s mother, and of the life of comparative poverty from which she had rescued her niece. At these times Georgie would sit motionless as a statue, with her hands locked together, and a peculiar expression in her black eyes, which seemed to be looking far away at something seen only to herself. She was not at all communicative, and even her aunt did not know exactly what the business was which had called her so suddenly to Chicago; but she was aware that it concerned some child, and that she had left it undone and turned back with Charlie; and when at last she came and was ushered into Mrs. Churchill’s room, where Mrs. Burton was, both ladies called her a self-denying angel, who always considered others before herself. There was a flush on Georgie’s cheeks, and then her eyes went through the window, and off across the river, with that far away, abstracted look which Maude had noticed so often, and speculated upon, wondering of what Georgie was thinking, and if there was anything preying upon her mind. Mrs. Churchill was very fond of Georgie, and she held her hand fast locked in her own, and listened with painful heart-throbs while she told what she knew of the terrible disaster which had resulted in Charlie’s lying so cold and dead in the room below. “I left Buffalo the same morning Charlie did,” she said, “but did not know he was on the train until the accident.” “Were you alone?” Mrs. Churchill asked. “No. You remember my half-brother Jack, who was at Oakwood two years ago; he met me in Buffalo, and after the accident remembered having seen some one in the front car who reminded him of Charlie, but it never occurred to him that it could be he until he found him dead.”