touch, or God best knows what, a sudden fancy began to thrill her.
She began by remembering an old pain that she had forgotten, an old
horror that she had resolutely put away all these years. She recalled
days of sickness and distrust,--days of an overshadowing fear,--days of
preparation for something that was to be prevented, that WAS prevented,
with mortal agony and fear. She thought of a life that might have
been,--she dared not say HAD been,--and wondered. It was six years ago:
if it had lived, it would have been as old as Carry. The arms which were
folded loosely around the sleeping child began to tremble, and tighten
their clasp. And then the deep potential impulse came, and with a
half-sob, half-sigh, she threw her arms out, and drew the body of the
sleeping child down, down, into her breast, down again and again as if
she would hide it in the grave dug there years before. And the gust that
shook her passed, and then, ah me! the rain.

A drop or two fell upon the curls of Carry, and she moved uneasily in
her sleep. But the woman soothed her again,--it was so easy to do it
now,--and they sat there quiet and undisturbed, so quiet that they might
have seemed incorporate of the lonely silent house, the slowly-declining
sunbeams, and the general air of desertion and abandonment, yet a
desertion that had in it nothing of age, decay, or despair.

Col. Starbottle waited at the Fiddletown hotel all that night in vain.
And the next morning, when Mr. Tretherick returned to his husks, he
found the house vacant and untenanted, except by motes and sunbeams.

When it was fairly known that Mrs. Tretherick had run away, taking Mr.
Tretherick's own child with her, there was some excitement, and much
diversity of opinion, in Fiddletown. "The Dutch Flat Intelligencer"
openly alluded to the "forcible abduction" of the child with the same
freedom, and it is to be feared the same prejudice, with which it had
criticised the abductor's poetry. All of Mrs. Tretherick's own sex, and
perhaps a few of the opposite sex, whose distinctive quality was not,
however, very strongly indicated, fully coincided in the views of "The
Intelligencer." The majority, however, evaded the moral issue: that
Mrs. Tretherick had shaken the red dust of Fiddletown from her dainty
slippers was enough for them to know. They mourned the loss of the fair
abductor more than her offence. They promptly rejected Tretherick as
an injured husband and disconsolate father