“Perhaps you might help me,” she said, rising to her elbow. “Somehow I feel as if——but you couldn’t.” “Who knows? I have helped a great many people in my lifetime.” “But not young girls like me, who have troubles that money cannot cure.” “Little lady, permit me to doubt that.” She rose higher on the sofa-pillows, and looked at him with her great, earnest eyes. “I will fancy that you are my father, and tell you every thing,” she said. “Do,” answered the old man, but his voice shook a little; “do.” Anna told him every thing, even to her love for Horace Savage, for the old man helped her forward with low spoken questions, and she could talk to him with more ease than if it had been her grandmother, with whom she was just a little shy about some of her feelings. There may be things in the human heart which we can confide to strangers more easily than we can explain them to our dearest friends. At any rate, Anna opened her innocent, young heart to that old man, as if she had been saying her prayers before God. With him she felt such a sense of protection that she smiled in his face more than once through her tears. “Let the whole thing alone, child. Move into the new house as soon as you like, and wait till I can think every thing over. But, above all things, get a little sunshine into those eyes; you shall never be sorry for having trusted the old man. As for that young scamp, Ward, Gould shall take care of him. But where do you live?” Anna gave him the name and number of the house. He seemed surprised. “Why, that house belongs to me; and you have been paying rent in it all the time to this good-hearted woman? I remember, my agent said that he had a good tenant there. I wont forget that the woman has been kind to you and your grandmother.” “Most of all to her,” said Anna. “And this grandmother—does she bear her age well?” “Oh! you must ask some one else—to me grandma is lovely.” “And she was kind to you?” “Kind!” Anna’s fine eyes opened wide at the question. “I was foolish to ask that, of course—grandmothers are always kind.” “But she isn’t, like any other grandmother that ever lived. She has petted us, worked for us, gone without food that we might have enough. When my father was alive——” “Hush! hush! we need not speak of him. Robert has told me all about that.” The old man was a little excited, and seemed to shrink into himself when Anna mentioned her father. So she changed the subject, and said she must go home; they would miss her and be frightened. “Yes,” the old man said, “perhaps they would. She was looking natural again and might go; but it would be as well not to say where she had been. No good in talking too much, even if it was only to an old grandmother.”