Miss Barnes, though on the sharp lookout, never discovered a vice in her. Whatever may have been her original faults, she seemed to have shed them with her rags, and the great gratitude she felt for her benefactor overwhelmed everything. She seemed to live but to do something for Miss Barnes.
To Nora, life was like a dream—a dream of heaven, at that. Always warm, always fed, always safe from roughness, surrounded by things so beautiful she scarcely dared to touch them; every want attended to before it was felt. It was too wonderful to seem true. In dreams she would often return to the desolate shanty, where the winds blew through the cracks, and the rickety old stove was no better fed than her mother and herself.
Five years rolled away. Miss Barnes grew to love this child of poverty very much, and to be grieved that she showed none of the joy of youth. For Nora walked around as though in a dream. She was always anxious to please, always cheerful, but never gay. She was too subdued. She never spoke loud. She never slammed a door, she never laughed.
“Nora,” said she one day, after studying her face some time in silence, “why are you not like other young girls?”
“Why am I unlike them?” asked Nora, looking up from the book she was reading.
“You’re not a bit like any young girl I ever saw,” said Miss Barnes; “you’re too sober, you never laugh and play.”
“I don’t know how to play,” said Nora, in a low tone; “I never did.”
“Poor child,” said Miss Barnes, “you never had any childhood. I wanted to give you one, but you were too old when I took you. Why, you’re a regular old woman.”
“Am I?” said Nora, with a smile.
“I don’t know what I’ll do to you,” Miss Barnes went on. “I’d like to make you over.”