“For me! Oh! do you mean that you have given me all that? Ten dollars!” gasped the astonished girl, whose quick eyes had detected the denomination of the bill. “Have you a right to give away so much money? What will your father and mother say? Why, I can’t believe it!”
Her voice shook from intense excitement and the hand that held the coveted sum trembled visibly.
“Yes, Ellen, I have the right to give away what I like, and I have no father nor mother, I regret to say, to question my pleasure in that respect. You need not say anything about it to your aunt unless you choose.”
“I guess I sha’n’t tell either Aunt Lu or Anna a word about it,” Ellen hastily interposed. “I shouldn’t have it long if I did. I shall keep very mum, and when my arm gets well, I will make a good use of it,” she added, with a gleam of triumph in her eyes that Allison never forgot. Then, with something very like a sob, she continued: “Why, miss, I think I must feel something like the slave I read about not long ago, when his master gave him his liberty: ‘I ’clar to goodness,’ he said, ‘dis am a new world to me!’ This money means freedom to me and a new world to live in. How I love you for being so kind to me! I—I hope you do not mind my saying it”—in an apologetic tone—“I know I’m of no account, but I haven’t had anybody to love since my mother died, seven years ago.”
Allison was deeply touched by the girl’s emotion, and the pathos of this last remark.
“Indeed, Ellen, you are of a great deal of account,” she returned, with a winning smile; “and when I come back to the city, in the fall, I will try to see you again, and I hope I shall find you well and happier than you are to-day. Ah, I think the carriage has come for you,” she concluded, as Doctor Ashmore’s attendant at that moment returned, accompanied by the coachman, who had come for the bundle.
The surgeon then came forward, gave his patient some directions, making an appointment for her to come to him again in a few days, after which Allison bade her a kind good-by, paid the hackman his fare, and charged him to “be sure and carry the bundle into the house for Ellen when she reached home.”
Then Allison turned to Doctor Ashmore and requested him to name his charge for setting the broken arm.
He smiled into her beautiful, earnest face.
“Are you in the habit of picking up disabled protégées in the streets of New York, Miss Allison?” he questioned.