"What is your name?" she said, gently taking the child's hand and drawing her into the bed-room, "we have not asked your name yet, little girl." "Mary Fuller, that is my name ma'am," replied the child, in her sweet, low voice. "And have you got a mother?" "I don't know," faltered the child, and a spot of crimson sprang into her pinched cheek. "Don't know!" "Please not to ask me about it," said the child, meekly. "I don't like to talk about my mother." "But your father," said Mrs. Chester, remarking the color that glowed with such unnatural brightness on the child's face with a thrill of pain, for it seemed to her as if a corpse had blushed. "My father! Oh, he is dead." The color instantly went out from her cheek, like a flash of fire suddenly extinguished there, and the child clasped her hands in a sort of thoughtful ecstasy, as if the mention of her father's name had lifted her soul to a communion with the dead. Mrs. Chester sat down by a bureau, and searched for one of Isabel's night-gowns in the drawer, now and then casting wistful glances on her singular guest. "Come," she said, gently, after a few minutes had elapsed, "let me take off your frock, then say your prayers and go to bed." "I have said my prayers," replied the child, lifting her eyes with a look that thrilled through and through Mrs. Chester. "When I think of my father, then I always say the prayers that he taught me, over in my heart." "Then you loved your father?" "Loved him!" replied the child, with a look of touching despondency. "My dear dead father--did you ask me if I loved him? What else in the wide, wide world had I to love?" "Your mother," said Mrs. Chester. That flush of crimson shot over the child's face again, and bowing her head with a look of the keenest anguish, she faltered out, "My mother!" "Well, my poor child," said Mrs. Chester, compassionating the strange feeling whose source she could only guess at, "I will not ask any more questions to-night. Keep up a good heart. You are almost an orphan, and God takes care of little orphans, you know." "Oh, yes, God will take care of me," answered the child, turning her large eyes downward upon her person, with a look that said more plainly than words, "helpless and ugly as I am." "It is the helpless--it is children whom our Saviour--you know about our Saviour?" "Oh, yes, I know." "Well, it was such little helpless creatures as you are whom our Saviour meant, when he said, 'Of such is the kingdom of Heaven.'" "Yes, such as I am, ma'am." The child again glanced at her person, and then with a look of tearful humility at Mrs. Chester. Mrs. Chester bent over the drawer she was searching, to conceal her tears; there was something strangely pathetic in the child's looks and words. "I thought," said the child, lifting her face and pointing to little Isabel, with a look of thrilling admiration, "I thought when I came in here, that Heaven must be full of little children like her." "And why like her?"