seemed to uncannily connect her
with the locality. I went on playfully:--

"That's not VERY old--but tell me--does your father, or DID your father,
ever speak of you as his 'old woman?'"

She nodded. "Then you thought I was mar?" she said, smiling.

It was such a relief to see her worn face relax its expression of
pathetic gravity--although this operation quite buried her eyes in their
black thickest hedge again--that I continued cheerfully: "It wasn't much
of a mistake, considering all you do for the house and family."

"Then you didn't tell Billy 'to go and be dead in the ground with mar,'
as he 'lows you did?" she said half suspiciously, yet trembling on the
edge of a smile.

No, I had not, but I admitted that my asking him to go to his mother
might have been open to this dismal construction by a sensitive infant
mind. She seemed mollified, and again turned to go.

"Good-night, Miss--you know your father didn't tell me your real name,"
I said.

"Karline!"

"Good-night, Miss Karline."

I held out my hand.

She looked at it and then at me through her intricate eyelashes. Then
she struck it aside briskly, but not unkindly, said "Quit foolin', now,"
as she might have said to one of the children, and disappeared through
the inner door. Not knowing whether to be amused or indignant, I
remained silent a moment. Then I took a turn outside in the increasing
darkness, listened to the now hurrying wind over the tree-tops,
re-entered the cabin, closed the door, and went to bed.

But not to sleep. Perhaps the responsibility towards these solitary
children, which Johnson had so lightly shaken off, devolved upon me as
I lay there, for I found myself imagining a dozen emergencies of their
unprotected state, with which the elder girl could scarcely grapple.
There was little to fear from depredatory man or beast--desperadoes of
the mountain trail never stooped to ignoble burglary, bear or panther
seldom approached a cabin--but there was the chance of sudden illness,
fire, the accidents that beset childhood, to say nothing of the
narrowing moral and mental effect of their isolation at that tender age.
It was scandalous in Johnson to leave them alone.

In the silence I found I could hear quite distinctly the sound of their
voices in the extension, and it was evident that Caroline was putting
them to bed. Suddenly a voice was uplifted--her own! She began to sing
and the others to join her. It was the repetition of a single