“I’m too big to be adopted,” Sally reassured her. “Nobody wants to adopt a 16-year-old girl. Here, you take Eloise to the weaving room with you.” Her voice was that of a managing, efficient, albeit loving mother, but when she turned toward the front steps of the main building her feet began to drag heavily, weighted with a fear which was reflected in her darkling blue eyes, and in the deepened pallor of her cheeks. But, oh, maybe it wasn’t that! Why did she always have to worry about that—now that she was sixteen? Why couldn’t she expect something perfectly lovely—like—like a father coming to claim his long-lost daughter? Maybe there’d be a mother, too— The vision Sally Ford had conjured up fastened wings to her feet. She was breathless, glowing, when she arrived at the closed door of the dread “office.” When Sally Ford opened the door of the office of the orphan asylum, radiance was wiped instantly from her delicate face, as if she had been stricken with sudden illness. For her worst fear was realized—the fear that had kept her awake many nights on her narrow cot, since her sixteenth birthday had passed. She cowered against the door, clinging to the knob as if she were trying to screw up her courage to flee from the disaster which fate, in bringing about her sixteenth birthday, had pitilessly planned for her, instead of the boon of long-lost relatives for which she had never entirely ceased to hope. “Sally!” Mrs. Stone, seated at the big roll-top desk, called sharply. “Say ‘How do you do?’ to the gentleman.... The girls are taught the finest of manners here, Mr. Carson, but they are always a little shy with strangers.” “Howdy-do, Mr. Carson,” Sally gasped in a whisper. “I believe this is the girl you asked for, Mr. Carson,” Mrs. Stone went on briskly, in her pleasant “company voice,” which every orphan could imitate with bitter accuracy. The man, a tall, gaunt, middle-aged farmer, nodded, struggled to speak, then hastily bent over a brass cuspidor and spat. That necessary act performed, he eyed Sally with a keen, speculative gaze. His lean face was tanned to the color and texture of brown leather, against which a coating of talcum powder, applied after a close shave of his black beard, showed ludicrously. “Yes, mum, that’s the girl, all right. Seen her when I was here last June. Wouldn’t let me have her then, mum, you may recollect.” Mrs. Stone smiled graciously. “Yes, I remember, Mr. Carson, and I was very sorry to disappoint you, but we have an unbreakable rule here not to board out one of our dear little girls until she is sixteen years old. Sally was sixteen last week, and now that school is out, I see no reason why she shouldn’t make her home with your family for the summer—or longer if you like. The law doesn’t compel us to send the girls to school after they are sixteen, you know.”