Bessie's Fortune

After Miss McPherson had sent her letter to her nephew, Archie, asking him to give his little daughter to her keeping, her whole nature seemed to change, and there was on her face a look of happy expectancy rarely seen there before. Even her cook, Sarah, and her maid, Flora, noticed and discussed it as they sat together by the kitchen fire; but as Miss McPherson never encouraged familiarities with her domestics, they asked her no questions, and only wondered and speculated when she bade them remove everything from the small bedroom at the end of the upper hall, which communicated with her own sleeping apartment. But when this room was papered and painted, and furnished with a pretty carpet of drab and blue, and a single iron bedstead with lace hangings, and a child's bureau and rocking-chair, and more than all when a large doll was bought, with a complete wardrobe for it, Flora could no longer restrain her curiosity, but asked if her mistress were expecting a child.

"Yes," was the reply, "my grandniece, Betsey, who was named for me. She lives at Stoneleigh, my old home in Wales, and I may get a letter any day saying she has sailed. I shall go to New York to meet her so have my things ready for me to start at a moment's notice."

So confident was Miss McPherson that her nephew would be glad to have his daughter removed from the influences around her to a home where she was sure of enough to eat, and that his frivolous wife would be glad to be rid of a child who must be in the way of her flirtations, that she was constantly expecting to hear that she was coming. She did not believe Archie would bring her himself, but she thought he would probably consign her to the care of some reliable person, or put her in charge of the captain or stewardess, and in her anxiety to have the little girl she had written a second letter three days after she sent the first. In this she had suggested the stewardess of the Celtic, whom she knew, and with whom she assured Archie he could trust his child. But days and weeks went by, until it was past the middle of June, and still there were no tidings of Bessie; at last, however, there came a foreign letter, addressed in a woman's hand to: "Miss Elizabeth McPherson, Allington, Worcester Co., Mass., U.S.A."

The Elizabeth was an affront to the good woman, who bristled all over with resentment, as she held the dainty envelope in her hand and studied the strange monogram, "D.A.M." (Daisy Allen McPherson).