Edith leaned and clasped both her hands around Mrs. Rowan's arm, and laid her cheek to them. "But he is coming back rich, he said he would; and what Dick said he'd do he always did. He is going to take us away from here, and get a pretty house, and come and live with us." A hysterical, half-laughing sob broke through the listener's quiet weeping. "He always did keep his word, Edith!" she cried. "Dick was a gallant lad. And I trust that the Lord will bring him back to me." "Oh! he'll come back," said Edith confidently, and with a slight air of haughtiness. "He'll come back himself." All the Christianity the child had seen had been such as to make the name of the Lord excite in her heart a feeling of antagonism. It is hard to believe that God means love when man means hate; and this child and her protectors had seen but little of the sunny side of humanity. Christians held aloof from the drunkard and his family, or approached them only to exhort or denounce. That they had any kinship with that miserable man, that in his circumstances they might have been what he was, never seemed to occur to them as possible. Dick fought with the boys who mocked his father, therefore he was a bad boy. Mrs. Rowan flamed up, and defended her husband, when the Rev. Dr. Martin denounced him, therefore she was almost as bad as he. So shallow are most judgments, arraigning effects without weighing causes. Nor did Edith fare better at their hands. She was to them a sort of vagabond. Who believed the story of her mother's romantic misfortunes? She was some foreign adventuress, most likely. Mr. Charles Yorke, whom they respected, had married a native of Seaton, and had two or three times honored that town with a short visit. They knew that he had cast off his own brother for marrying this child's mother. Therefore she had no claim on their respect. Moreover, some of the ladies for whom young Mrs. Yorke had done sewing had not the pleasantest of recollections connected with her. A poor person has no right to be proud and high-spirited, and the widowed exile was a very fiery woman. She would not sit at table with their servants, she would not be delighted when they patronized her, and she would not be grateful for the scanty wages they gave her. She had even dared to break out upon Mrs. Cleaveland when that lady had sweetly requested her to enter her house by the side door, when she came to sew. "In Poland a person like you would scarcely have been allowed to tie my mother's shoes!" she cried. The lady answered suavely, "But we are not in Poland, madam;" but she never forgave the insolence--still less because her husband laughed at it, and rather liked Mrs. Yorke's spirit. These were the ladies whom Edith had heard talk of religion; so she lifted her head, dropped her eyelids, and said defiantly, "Dick will come home himself!"