This done and Helen’s baggage ordered to her room, he seemed to think he had discharged his duty as host, and as Mark had left he began to grow fidgety, for a tête-à-tête with Helen was not what he desired. He had said to her all he could think to say, for it never once occurred to him to inquire after the deacon’s family. He had asked for Dr. Grant, but his solicitude went no further, and the inmates of the farm-house might have been dead and buried for aught he knew to the contrary. The omission was not made purposely, but because he really did not feel enough of interest in people so widely different from himself even to ask for them, much less to suspect how Helen’s blood boiled as she detected the omission and imputed it to intended slight, feeling glad when he excused himself, saying he must go back to Katy, but would send his mother down to see her. _His mother._ Then _she_ was there, the one whom Helen dreaded most of all, whom she had invested with every possible terror, hoping now that she would not be in haste to come down. She might have spared herself anxiety on this point, as the lady in question was not anxious to meet a person who, could she have had her way, would not have been there at all. From the first moment of consciousness after the long hours of suffering Katy had asked for Helen, rather than her mother. “Send for Helen; I am so tired, and she could always rest me,” was her reply, when asked by Wilford what he could do for her. “Send for Helen; I want her so much,” she had said to Mrs. Cameron, when she came, repeating the wish until a consultation was held between the mother and son, touching the propriety of sending for Helen. “She would be of no use whatever, and might excite our Katy. Quiet is highly important just now,” Mrs. Cameron had said, thus veiling under pretended concern for Katy her aversion to the girl whose independence in declining her dressmaker had never been forgiven, and whom she had set down in her mind as rude and ignorant. “If her coming would do Katy harm she ought not to come,” Wilford thought, while Katy in her darkened room moaned on— “Send for sister Helen; please send for sister Helen.” At last, on the fourth day, Mrs. Banker, Mark Ray’s mother, came to the house, and in consideration of the strong liking she had evinced for Katy ever since her arrival in New York, and the great respect felt for her by Mrs. Cameron, she was admitted to the chamber and heard the plaintive pleadings, “Send for sister Helen,” until her motherly heart was touched, and as she sat with her son at dinner she spoke of the young girl-mother moaning so for Helen. Whether it was Mark’s great pity for Katy, or whether he was prompted by some more selfish motive, we do not profess to say, but that he was greatly excited was very evident from his manner as he exclaimed: