Mrs. Bryant, without relinquishing her hold on Mildred, put the other arm around her eldest daughter.
Clover flushed violently. There was a look in her mother's loving eyes, the hint of a smile on her lips, which the girl recognized. It was a certain exalted expression of the dear lined face which her children had seen before, and it always meant rising to an emergency. The girl's heart contracted painfully.
The wet clothing on the lines flapped spasmodically behind the trio. Unsteady board fences enclosed the narrow heated area. The poverty-stricken tree stretched its gaunt, ill-clothed arms aloft, and the blue-jay's harsh, jeering note added one more petty discomfort to the surroundings.
"My dear little girls," said the gentle voice with unusual tenderness.
The sisters only regarded their mother in an apprehensive silence.
"I went to your room for something, Clover, and I found my letter from Uncle Adolph. I have just been reading it. Don't regret it. I had to know."
CHAPTER III.
A MORNING DRIVE.
In a city like Chicago, where events occur with phenomenal rapidity, two or three years make great changes in a neighborhood. Hyde Park, which long hung back like a rebellious child loath to yield its independence, had at last placed its reluctant hand in that of the mother city; but with the suburb's growing population there had already come a new state of affairs. It was no longer the case that everybody in Hyde Park knew everybody else. Those families who made homes there when but two trains ran daily to and from town, felt, on the rare and rarer occasions of meeting one another in a stranger crowd, the drawing of a tie tender as that of kinship.
Mrs. Bryant belonged to this pioneer set, and so did Mr. Van Tassel. To those residents who had danced with them "long before the fire" at the parties in the old Hyde Park hotel, this was reason sufficient why the wealthy widower should manifest a continued interest in the friend of his young manhood and her fatherless children. Those long-finished polkas in the long-destroyed hostelry on the lake shore, where scattered neighbors once met with the unconventional jollity of family reunion, had left behind them a green memory in some hearts.