minute
out of her sight, touch Milly.

Nurse, surreptitiously grasping a frill of the child's muslin frock,
wept, silent and remorseful, as she walked alongside.

Once, the child, who lay for the better part of the half-mile to her
home in a kind of stupor, opened her eyes again beneath her mother's
frightened gaze and was heard to mutter something about some flowers.

"She is asking for the primroses she had gathered!" Mrs Eddington
whispered, in a tone of intensest relief. "Did you bring them, nurse?"

The unfortunate nurse, of course, had not brought them.

"Milly's po'r flo'rs is dead," Milly grieved in the little weak voice
they heard then for the first time. "Milly's daddy took Milly's flo'rs,
and they died."

To that astonishing statement the child adhered during the first days
of her long illness, till she forgot, and spoke of it no more. For any
questioning, she gave no explanation of her words. She never enlarged
upon the first declaration in any way, nor did she even alter the form
of the words in which she gave it expression. Always she alluded to the
curious delusion with a grieving voice, often with tears.

"Dear daddy is dead, darling," the mother said to her in an awed
whisper, kneeling at her side. "He could not come to Milly."

"Milly's daddy took Milly's flo'rs, and they died," the sad little
voice protested; and the child softly whimpered upon the pillow.

"The child can't, of course, even remember her father," Major Walsh
said, with impatience, being sick of the subject and the importance
attached to it. "She was only two when he died."

"How can you tell what a child of two remembers?" Mrs Eddington asked.
"She was very fond of Harry. I think she does remember."

Persistently, in her mind recurred an episode of the last day of her
husband's life. He had carried his little daughter, laughing and
prattling to him, down from the nursery, and had put her in her
mother's arms. The child, when he turned to go, had clung to him.
"Don't leave Milly, daddy. Take Milly too," she cried. Laughing, he had
kissed her. "Not now--not now," he had said--"but later I will come and
take Milly."

Then he had gone out, with a smile still on his face, and had fallen
dead as he walked across the park.

It was inevitable that in these days the memory of her husband should
more fully occupy the young widow's mind. He had died of heart disease;
his child, it was now discovered, had a certain weakness of the