. She was looking very badly that morning, her
face was stained, and her eye hard with a look as if tears had
frozen in them. She had come in a soiled waist, too, without any
collar.

"For Heaven's sake, Eva Tenny, what ails you?" Fanny cried.

Eva flung herself for answer on the floor, and fairly writhed. Words
were not enough expression for her violent temperament. She had to
resort to physical manifestations or lose her reason. As she
writhed, she groaned as one might do who was dying in extremity of
pain.

Ellen, when she heard her aunt's groans, stopped, and stood in the
entry viewing it all. She thought at first that her aunt was ill,
and was just about to call out to know if she should go for the
doctor, all her grievances being forgotten in this evidently worse
stress, when her mother fairly screamed again, stooping over her
sister, and trying to raise her.

"Eva Tenny, you tell me this minute what the matter is."

Then Eva raised herself on one elbow, and disclosed a face distorted
with wrath and woe, like a mask of tragedy.

"He's gone! he's gone!" she shrieked out, in an awful, shrill voice,
which was like the note of an angry bird. "He's gone!"

"For God's sake, not--Jim?"

"Yes, he's gone! he's gone! Oh, my God! my God! he's gone!"

All at once the little Amabel appeared, slipping past Ellen
silently. She stood watching her mother. She was vibrating from head
to foot as if strung on wires. She was not crying, but she kept
catching her breath audibly; her little hands were twitching in the
folds of her frock; she winked rapidly, her lids obscuring and
revealing her eyes until they seemed a series of blue sparks. She
was no paler than usual--that was scarcely possible--but her skin
looked transparent, pulses were evident all over her face and her
little neck.

"You don't mean he's gone with--?" gasped Fanny.

Suddenly Eva raised herself with a convulsive jerk from the floor to
her feet. She stood quite still. "Yes, he has gone," she said, and
all the passion was gone from her voice, which was much more
terrible in its calm.

"You don't mean with--?"

"Yes; he has gone with Aggie." Eva spoke in a voice like a
deaf-mute's, quite free from inflections. There was something
dreadful about her rigid attitude. Little Amabel looked at her
mother's eyes, then cowered down and began to cry aloud. Ellen came
in and took her in her arms, whispering to her to soothe her. She
tried to coax her away, but