Andrew looked anxiously at his wife, rose, and caught up Ellen in his arms with a hug of fervent and protective love. "Don't you worry, father's darlin'," he whispered. "Don't you worry about anythin' you have heard. Father will always have enough to take care of you with." Jim Tenny, when Andrew set the child down, caught her up again with a sounding kiss. "Don't you let your big ears ache, you little pitcher," said he, with a gay laugh. "Little doll-babies like you haven't anythin' to worry about if Lloyd's shut down every day in the year." "They're the very ones whom it concerns," said Nahum Beals, when Ellen and her mother had gone up-stairs. "Well, I wouldn't have had that little nervous thing hear all this, if I'd thought," Andrew said, anxiously. Joseph Atkins, whom Fanny had stationed in a sheltered corner near the stove when she opened the door, peered around at Andrew. "Seems as if she was too young to get much sense of it," he remarked. "My Maria, that's her age, wouldn't." "Ellen hears everything and makes her own sense of it," said Andrew, "and the Lord only knows what she's made of this. I hope she won't fret over it." "I wish my tongue had been cut off before I said anything before her," cried Eva. "I know just what that child is. She'll find out what a hard world she's in soon enough, anyway, and I don't want to be the one to open her eyes ahead of time." Ellen went to bed quietly, and her mother did not think she had paid much attention to what had been going on, and said so when she went down-stairs after Ellen had been kissed and tucked in bed and the lamp put out. "I guess she didn't mind much about it, after all," she said to Andrew. "I guess the room was pretty warm, and that was what made her cheeks so red." But Ellen, after her mother left her, turned her little head towards the wall and wept softly, lest some one hear her, but none the less bitterly that she had no right conception of the cause of her grief. There was over her childish soul the awful shadow of the labor and poverty of the world. She knew naught of the substance behind the shadow, but the darkness terrified her all the more, and she cried and cried as if her heart would break. Then she, with a sudden resolution, born she could not have told of what strange understanding and misunderstanding of what she had heard that evening, slipped out of bed, groped about until she found her cherished doll, sitting in her little chair in the corner. She was accustomed to take the doll to bed with her, and had undressed her for that purpose early in the evening, but she had climbed into bed and left her sitting in the corner. "Don't you want your dolly?" her mother had asked.