up as a kind of queen whose slightest
wish is to be obeyed. To do her justice she has not many wishes. She is
very quiet, talks but little, and seems in a kind of brown study most of
the time. Occasionally she rouses up and asks if we are sure he is
dead--the he being her husband--the last one, presumably. When we tell
her he is she smiles and says, 'I think I'm glad, for now I shall never
have to sing again in public.' Then she says in a very different tone,
'Baby is dead, too; and my head has ached so hard ever since that I
cannot think or remember, only it was sudden and took my life away.'

"She has an old red cloak which at times she wraps around a shawl, and
cuddles it as if it were a baby, crooning some negro melody she heard
South. There must have been a little child who died, but she is not
clear on the subject. Sometimes it is a baby; sometimes a grown girl;
sometimes it died in one place; sometimes in another; but always just
before she was going to sing, and the room was full of coffins until she
sank down, and knew no more. Whether my uncle has taken pains to inquire
about the child, I don't know. He does not like children, and is
satisfied to have Amy back, and is trying to atone for his former
harshness. He calls her Amy, instead of Eudora, because the latter was
the name by which she was known in the Homer Troupe, and he saw it
flaunted on a handbill advertising the last concert in which she took
part.

"Don't think I have heard all this from him. He is tighter than the bark
of a tree with regard to his affairs, and I do not think any one in the
town knows anything definite about her singing in public, or the asylum;
but there is a servant, Peter, who has grown old in the family. He knows
everything, and has told me about my uncle bringing the child home, and
how she cried for days for Shaky, a colored man, and slept in the red
cloak, and kept it around her in the day-time because he gave it to
her. I have learned that she was never lawfully adopted, and that my
uncle has made no will. Still she must be something to him, but
certainly not his lawful child, or why his reticence with regard to her.
I am the only near relative bearing the Crompton name. I have made
myself very necessary to him--am in fact, in a way, a son of the house.
He is very much broken, and if he dies without a will--

"Well, all things come to him who waits, and I can afford to wait in
such comfortable quarters. Do you catch on, an