The three women, the mother, and aunt, and the visiting neighbor, all looked at her, and Ellen smiled up at them as innocently sweet as a flower. There was that in Ellen's smile and regard at that time which no woman could resist. Suddenly the visiting neighbor laid a finger softly under her chin and tilted up her little face towards the light. Then she said with that unconscious poetry of bereavement which sees a likeness in all fair things of earth to the face of the lost treasure, "I do believe she looks like my first little girl that died." After the visiting woman had gone, Fanny and Eva calling after her to come again, they looked at each other, then at Ellen. "That little girl that died favored the Stebbinses, and was dark as an Injun," said Fanny, "no more like Ellen--" "That's so," acquiesced Eva; "I remember that young one. Lookin' like Ellen--I'd like to see the child that did look like her; there ain't none round these parts. I wish you could have seen folks stare at her when I took her down street yesterday. One woman said, 'Ain't she pretty as a picture,' so loud I heard it, but Ellen didn't seem to." "Sometimes I wonder if we'll make her proud," Fanny said, in a hushed voice, with a look of admiration that savored of worship at Ellen. "She don't ever seem to notice," said Eva, with a hushed response. Indeed, Ellen had seemed to pay no attention whatever to their remarks, whether from an innate humility and lack of self-consciousness, or because she was so accustomed to adulation that it had become as the breath of her nostrils, to be taken no more account of. She had seated herself in her favorite place in a rocking-chair at a west window, with her chin resting on the sill, and her eyes staring into the great out-of-doors, full of winds and skies and trees and her own imaginings. She would sit so, motionless, for hours at a time, and sometimes her mother would rouse her almost roughly. "What be you thinkin' about, settin' there so still?" she would ask, with eyes of vague anxiety fixed upon her, but Ellen could never answer. Though it was getting late, it did not seem dark as early as usual, since there was a full moon and there was snow on the ground which gave forth a pale light in a wide surface of reflection. However, the moon was behind clouds, for it was beginning to snow again quite heavily, and the white flakes drove in whirlwinds past the street-lamp on the corner of the street. Now and then a tramping and muffled figure came into the radius of light, then passed into the white gloom beyond. Fanny was preparing supper, and the light from the dining-room shone in where Ellen sat, but the sitting-room was not lighted. Ellen began to smell the fragrance of tea and toast, and there was a reflection of the dining-room table and lamp outside pictured vividly against the white sheet of storm.