he was ill, and her
mother gave me one look, and bundled her right out to the carriage, and
off to a better place, and we got a doctor and a nurse. But all that
night she was in danger of her life. I went in to her room that evening,
to put things in order, and she was lying on the bed like a dead
thing--white, sick, and with her eyes never moving off her mother's
face. I could hear her murmuring the whole story, the shame and the
bitter cruelty of it, crying sometimes--and her mother crying, too.

"'And, Mama,' she said--the innocence of her! 'Mama, did the doctor tell
you that there might have been a baby?--I didn't know it myself until a
few weeks ago! And that's why they're so frightened about me now. But,'
she said, beginning to cry again, 'I should have hated it--I've always
hated it, and I'd rather have it all over--I don't want to have to face
anything more!'

"Well, it looked then as if she couldn't possibly live through the
night, and all her mother could think of was to comfort her. She told
her that they would go away and forget it all, and Miss Annie clung to
her through the whole terrible thing. We none of us got any sleep that
night, and I think it was at about three o'clock the next morning that I
crept to the door, and the doctor--Doctor Leslie--an old English doctor
who was very kind, came to the door and gave me the poor little pitiful
baby in a blanket. I almost screamed when I took it, for the poor little
soul was alive, working her little mouth! I took her to my room, and
indeed I baptized her myself--I named her Mary for my mother, and Leslie
for the doctor, but I never thought she'd need a name--then. She was
under four pounds, and with a little claw like a monkey's paw, and so
thin we didn't dare dress her--we thought she was three months too soon,
then, and I just sat watching her, waiting for her to die, and thinking
of my own----!

"Miss Annie was given up the next day, she'd gone into a brain fever,
but my poor little soul was wailing a good healthy wail--I remember I
cried bitterly when the doctor told me not to hope for her! But she
lived--and on the fourth day Mrs. Melrose sent us away, and we went and
stayed in the country for two months after that.

"Then I had a letter from the Riviera, the first that'd come. Miss Annie
was getting well, her hair was coming out curly, and she hardly
remembered anything about what had happened at all. She wasn't nineteen
then, poor child! She had cr