She lay like marble. A beautiful woman, truly. The eyelids with their long lashes looked as if they were carven. There was only an infrequent sign of respiration.
“We hope we are on the track of some one belonging to her. The doctors want her moved to the hospital.”
The next morning Emma Boyd journeyed out to her brother’s. A coarse, common, loud voiced farmer, rough and unkempt and five unruly children. She was appalled, and a dreary stretch of prairie land with hardly a neighbor in sight. Why she had been crazy to come! and she found farm work quite too hard for her. She had better be housemaid at Laconia, or go in the mills again. And when her brother found she had a little money he was eager to get hold of it. Yes, she had better return to her native town, especially as her brother was meaning to marry again.
So she came back to Laconia which was a manufacturing town with iron mines at its elbow. There were varying fortunes as there often is with the poor. Mill work when she had to leave the child alone, then a boarding house which really prospered, but was sold with some other property for a big factory. Then housekeeping for a nervous invalid wife, and here she had met Mrs. Searing who had proved a true friend. After that sewing, making skirts for a dressmaker and working at childrens’ clothes. When it was dull times they drew on the little fund. The girl was ambitious and had mapped out her own life, different from what her mother had planned. They loved each other but it was as if two foreign natures were trying to assimilate and there was no conformable ground for perfect harmony. Yes, she would take this last step for the girl’s sake; she owed it to her.
CHAPTER II
A NEW OUTLOOK
Lilian Boyd glanced around the station at Mount Morris with a kind of joyous surprise and wonder. The beautiful town with its straight streets, some of them with a narrow park in the centre, houses that were palatial to her inexperienced eyes, with terraced lawns, wide porches, graceful shrubbery and a profusion of flowers. True, the station was quite at one side and a little farther down the road crossed the river that went meandering along, too winding and shallow for business purposes. Opposite there was a succession of wooded hills with here and there a stately residence.
“How beautiful, mother!” Lilian cried, moved in every pulse of her being, her eyes lustrous with tears, her lips quivering.