Mrs. Robertson never had cause to regret her kind-hearted decision. Tessa was devotedly attached to Katie, and followed, rather than led, her friend. She was shy with the boys at first, but soon came to show them the same sisterly feeling that their sister did. Her wit, quickness, and power of story-telling soon made her a valuable addition to the family circle, while the genial home influences and good fare so told upon herself that her extreme delicacy soon disappeared, and she became capable of as much work or endurance as Katie herself. CHAPTER XII. GRETCHEN. German Gretchen was absent from the mill one morning. No one noticed it except Miss Peters, who marked her down for one less day's wages. The young girl, who had drifted into the manufacturing town, as so many do, in search of work, had never been a favorite or attracted particular attention. She was a fair work-woman, obeyed rules, and went her way to the boarding-house when night came; but she made no friends either there or at the mill, and it would scarcely have been noticed had she disappeared altogether. Somehow she had floated into Sunday-school, and been placed in the class which afterward became Etta Mountjoy's, but here her apparent stolidity made her perhaps the least interesting of all the girls. Perhaps this was in part owing to the fact that one is not likely to be very talkative in a strange language. But Gretchen had a heart, although no one in Squantown had yet found, or cared to find, it. It was safe at home in the fatherland, where the house-mother and father had as much as they could do to put enough black bread to support life into the mouths of the five little children, too young to do as she had done, when she accompanied a neighbor's family, who were emigrating to seek their fortune in the New World. These neighbors had gone to the far West, and not caring to be burdened with a possibly unproductive member of their party, had left the little girl in the hands of a German employment agency, through which she had found her way to Squantown Mills. Gretchen had many homesick hours when she would have given a great deal more than she possessed to be at home again sharing the poverty and hardships of the Old World, but she expressed her feelings to no one. Indeed, she knew no one to whom she could have expressed them. She did her day's work faithfully, receiving her regular payment of fifty cents, and occasionally a little more, which little she resolutely put away at the bottom of her box, to be sent home to her mother and the little ones when there should be a good opportunity.