drip faster and the sobs came one
upon another until she was choked by them and she began to make a noise.
She sobbed and cried more convulsively, until she began to scream and
went into something like hysterics. She dropped down on her face and
rolled over and over, clutching at her breast and her sides and throwing
out her arms. The people of the house had gone to the sociable and she
was alone, so no one heard or came near her. She shrieked and sobbed and
rolled over and over, clutching at her flesh, trying to gasp out words
that choked her.

"O, Lord!" she gasped, wild with the insensate agony of a poor, hysteria
torn, untaught, uncontrolled thing, "I don't know what I've done! I
don't! 'Tain't fair! I didn't go to! I can't bear it! He h'ain't got
nothin' to bear, he ain't! O, Lord God, look down on me!"

She was the poor, helpless outcome of the commonest phase of life, but
her garret saw a ghastly tragedy as she choked through her hysterics. Who
is to blame for and who to prevent such tragedies, let deep thinkers
strive to tell.

The day after this was the one on which little Margery Latimer came into
her life. It was in the early spring, just before the child had gone to
Boston to begin her art lessons. She had come to Janway's Mills to see a
poor woman who had worked for her mother. The woman lived in the house in
which Susan had her bare room. She began to talk about the girl half
fretfully, half contemptuously.

"She's the one Jack Williams got into trouble and then left to get out of
it by herself as well as she could," she said. "She might ha' known it.
Gals is fools. She can't work at the Mills any more, an' last night when
we was all at the Sosherble, she seems to've had a spasm o' some kind;
she can't get out o' bed this mornin' and lies there lookin' like death
an' moanin'. I can't 'tend to her, I've got work o' my own to do. Lansy!
how she was moanin' when I passed her door! Seemed like she'd kill
herself!"

"Oh, poor thing!" cried Margery; "let me go up to her."

She was a sensitive creature, and the colour had ebbed out of her pretty
face.

"Lor, no!" the woman cried; "she ain't the kind o' gal you'd oughter be
doing things for, she was allus right down common, an' she's sunk down
'bout as low as a gal can."

But Margery went up to the room where the moaning was going on. She stood
outside the door on the landing for a few moments, her heart trembling in
her side before she went in. Her lif