By this time Posey had come close to him, and putting her bundle and basket down on the abutting stone work of the bridge, she rolled up her sleeve and showed her arm, across which ran a number of angry red welts. “And they’re worse here,” she said, putting her hand up to her shoulders. “My!” he exclaimed, his tone full of mingled sympathy and indignation. “Whatever did you do that your mother whipped you like that?” “She wasn’t my mother,” was the vehement reply, all Posey’s sense of outraged suffering breaking out afresh. “She was only the woman who took me from the Refuge in Cleveland; she made me work from morning till night, and scolded me the whole time; she was the crossest woman you ever saw, and she wouldn’t let me go to school after she had promised at the Refuge that I should. And she was mad and whipped me that way because I told her that she was a mean, wicked liar, just as she was.” Her eyes flashed with the remembrance. “Haven’t you anybody of your own?” he asked. She shook her head. “My mother and father both died when I was a little bit of a girl.” Then with a piteous little cry, “I don’t see why my mother couldn’t have lived or I have died, too!” and overcome with a mingling of weariness, nervous excitement, and emotion, Posey dropped down beside her bundle, and hiding her face in it burst into a passion of sobs. “There, there,” and as he spoke there was a shake in his own voice, and a moisture in his own eyes. “Don’t cry so, don’t. I’m awfully sorry for you. I’ve lost my father and mother, too, and I know how tough it is on a fellow, though Uncle John and everybody have been good to me.” By this time Posey had succeeded in checking her sobs, and in answer to his questions she poured out her whole story, ending with her flight. “You’re a regular brick,” he exclaimed with boyish enthusiasm as she finished, “to start off that way, alone in the night. I’d like to see my cousin Emma or Fannie doing anything of that sort, and they both bigger than you are; but my, they hardly dare to look out of doors alone after it comes dark! Won’t I have something to tell them, though, when I go home? And I don’t blame you for running away, either, though to be sure,” he added impartially, “it might have been better if you had kept out of a row.” “Yes, it would,” Posey admitted meekly. “But now that you have done it,” he asked in a practical tone, and with a business-like clearness, “what are you going to do?”