But the rooms were shut up; the child Georgie was with her father’s friends, and Mrs. Freeman Burton stole back to her fashionable house, and cried all the morning over the memory of other days, when she and her dead sister had been the world to each other. Six months later, and she received another paper containing a marked paragraph. Mr. Heyford had married again, and lived now on Varick street, whither Mrs. Burton ventured to go, crying over the little Louise, who had a look like the dead sister, and appearing far more friendly toward the second Mrs. Heyford than she had toward the first. Still, there was no wish expressed for further intercourse, and the families for years knew nothing of each other except through the little presents of books and clothes which were occasionally sent from Madison Square to the little Louise, and which Mrs. Heyford kept. When Georgie was thirteen, she heard that her aunt had gone abroad, and in the exciting scenes of the ensuing years which followed, she almost forgot the existence of such a relative until a letter came from her, saying she had returned to New York and reopened her house, and was coming in a few weeks to Chicago to find her _dear niece_. “I have been a very proud, wicked woman,” she wrote, “but I hope I am trying to do better, and wish to make some amends for my treatment of my poor sister by being kind to her child.” This was the secret of the whole. Mrs. Burton did believe herself a better woman, and perhaps she was. An ardent admirer of Dr. Pusey, she had in her the elements which made her afterwards a devoted Ritualist, and she wanted to do something which should prove her reform to herself. Upon inquiry in the neighborhood where she had left her sister’s family she could learn nothing of them, so completely had they dropped out of memory. Remembering at last the name of Mr. Heyford’s former employer, she went to him and heard that her brother-in-law was dead, and the family in Chicago; that was all the man could tell her. Of Georgie’s marriage he knew nothing. Mr. Heyford died years ago, he said, and he had taken the boy Jack into his employ until he went West, since which time he had heard nothing from him. In this dilemma, Mrs. Burton wrote to Georgie, directing to Jack’s care, and then waited the result. For days the letter lay unclaimed, and then appeared among the list of advertised in one of the daily papers. It caught Jack’s eye, and he immediately went for it and carried it to Georgie, who counted it the brightest day of her life when her aunt came to their humble home, and offered to adopt her as her daughter and give her every advantage which the heiress of Mrs. Freeman Burton ought to have. There was no hesitancy on Georgie’s part. Dearly as she loved little Annie, she loved ambition more, and said at once, “I will go.”