myself, and leaving the now fully aroused woman in the hall, I was
half-way across the parlor floor when the latter stopped me with a
shrill cry:

"Don't leave me! I have never seen anything before so horrible. The poor
dear! The poor dear! Why don't he take those dreadful things off her?"

She alluded not only to the piece of furniture which had fallen upon the
prostrate woman, and which can best be described as a cabinet with
closets below and shelves above, but to the various articles of
_bric-a-brac_ which had tumbled from the shelves, and which now lay in
broken pieces about her.

"He will do so; they will do so very soon," I replied. "He is waiting
for some one with more authority than himself; for the Coroner, if you
know what that means."

"But what if she's alive! Those things will crush her. Let us take them
off. I'll help. I'm not too weak to help."

"Do you know who this person is?" I asked, for her voice had more
feeling in it than I thought natural to the occasion, dreadful as it
was.

"I?" she repeated, her weak eyelids quivering for a moment as she tried
to sustain my scrutiny. "How should I know? I came in with the policeman
and haven't been any nearer than I now be. What makes you think I know
anything about her? I'm only the scrub-woman, and don't even know the
names of the family."

"I thought you seemed so very anxious," I explained, suspicious of her
suspiciousness, which was of so sly and emphatic a character that it
changed her whole bearing from one of fear to one of cunning in a
moment.

"And who wouldn't feel the like of that for a poor creature lying
crushed under a heap of broken crockery!"

Crockery! those Japanese vases worth hundreds of dollars! that ormulu
clock and those Dresden figures which must have been more than a couple
of centuries old!

"It's a poor sense of duty that keeps a man standing dumb and staring
like that, when with a lift of his hand he could show us the like of
her pretty face, and if it's dead she be or alive."

As this burst of indignation was natural enough and not altogether
uncalled for from the standpoint of humanity, I gave the woman a nod of
approval, and wished I were a man myself that I might lift the heavy
cabinet or whatever it was that lay upon the poor creature before us.
But not being a man, and not judging it wise to irritate the one
representative of that sex then present, I made no remark, but only took
a few steps farther into the r