"Your mother should not let you sew so much," said Ralph. "It is bad for a growing girl."
"I have no mother, sir, and neither has poor Ollie."
"Neither has who?"
"Ollie—Oliver, my little brother, sir."
Ralph thought she said the name oddly.
"Oliver?" he repeated. "Is that what you said?"
"That is the same name, but Ollie's mother was French, and we have lived in France, where they say it as I do."
"You and Ollie lived in France?" Mr. Trulock said. He felt strangely interested in the child. She was a rather pretty little girl, with a pale round face and very soft dark eyes: she wore her short dark hair tucked away behind her little ears, and she was dressed in a plain and scanty black cotton frock, her straw hat being trimmed with a morsel of fresh black crape. Something in her look, her voice, and above all her smile, interested him: they reminded him of some one, he could not think of whom—the slight foreign accent puzzled him, perhaps.
She answered his question after a momentary hesitation,—
"Yes; me and Ollie and our father."