ng the child and going to Boston to visit her folks, so when
they hadn't seen her around, and the house shut, they jumped to the
conclusion that was where she was. They were the neighbours that lived
right around her, but they didn't have much to do with her, and she'd
gone out of her way to tell them about her Boston plan, and they didn't
make much reply when she did.

"Well, there was this house shut up, and the man and woman missing and
the child. Then all of a sudden one of the women that lived the
nearest remembered something. She remembered that she had waked up
three nights running, thinking she heard a child crying somewhere, and
once she waked up her husband, but he said it must be the Bisbees'
little girl, and she thought it must be. The child wasn't well and was
always crying. It used to have colic spells, especially at night. So
she didn't think any more about it until this came up, then all of a
sudden she did think of it. She told what she had heard, and finally
folks began to think they had better enter that house and see if there
was anything wrong.

"Well, they did enter it, and they found that child dead, locked in one
of the rooms. (Mrs. Dennison and Mrs. Bird never used that room; it
was a back bedroom on the second floor.)

"Yes, they found that poor child there, starved to death, and frozen,
though they weren't sure she had frozen to death, for she was in bed
with clothes enough to keep her pretty warm when she was alive. But
she had been there a week, and she was nothing but skin and bone. It
looked as if the mother had locked her into the house when she went
away, and told her not to make any noise for fear the neighbours would
hear her and find out that she herself had gone.

"Mrs. Dennison said she couldn't really believe that the woman had
meant to have her own child starved to death. Probably she thought the
little thing would raise somebody, or folks would try to get in the
house and find her. Well, whatever she thought, there the child was,
dead.

"But that wasn't all. The father came home, right in the midst of it;
the child was just buried, and he was beside himself. And--he went on
the track of his wife, and he found her, and he shot her dead; it was
in all the papers at the time; then he disappeared. Nothing had been
seen of him since. Mrs. Dennison said that she thought he had either
made way with himself or got out of the country, nobody knew, but they
did know th