Downstairs, Mrs. Moore left to solitude and bitter thoughts, worked with swift, skilled fingers, and set lips. Not long alone; some one came to help her—a sister, married, and living at ease in a lovely home only a few streets away; a younger sister who was sorry, so blindly and unwisely sorry for the elder’s harder lot, that she could not keep back her words of indignant sympathy. [Illustration: “SOME ONE CAME TO HELP HER.”] “It’s a shame!” she said, “just a burning shame, the way you are treated by those children. The idea of your being down on your knees mopping up the musses which they have made, on purpose to vex you. If I were you, Sophia, I wouldn’t endure it another day. It is a wonder to me that their father permits such a state of things. Henry and I were speaking of it last night.” “Their father doesn’t know the half that goes on,” Mrs. Moore said, speaking quickly in defence of her husband. “What is the use? We live in an uproar all the time, as it is. And after all, Emma, they are his children.” “I don’t care. You are his wife. You owe something to your self respect. Henry thinks so too; he thinks it is a shame. Why do you go on the floor and clean after them? Isn’t that girl as able to mop up her dishwater as you are?” Mrs. Moore wrung the wet, greasy cloth with a nervous grip, letting some of the soiled drops trickle down her arm, in her haste, and answered with eyes that glowed: “To tell the truth, I would scrub the floor after her all day, for the sake of getting her out of my sight for an hour.” And this was the help Mrs. Moore received. THE MISSION OF A GRAY WOOLLEN SOCK. [Illustration: V]ARIOUS exclamations greeted Nell Erwin as she entered the schoolroom and drew out her work—a coarse gray woollen sock. It was “Fancy Friday” at Daisy Hill Seminary—something peculiar to the place. Three Fridays out of the month were spent in the customary elocutionary exercises, but the afternoon of the fourth was spent in a cosey, informal way, the girls, both day scholars and boarders, bringing their fancy work, and Madam Lane reading to them from some standard work. At the present time she was in the midst of a translation of the Iliad, but I fear that in spite of Madam’s clear and beautiful rendition, “Jove, the cloud-gatherer,” “Juno, the ox-eyed,” and the other Homeric worthies, were less fascinating than “rick-rack” and “Kensington stitches.”