April 1. When a new month comes in it always seems as if something should happen. The divisions of time do not appeal to the feelings as simple arbitrary conveniences, but as real endings and beginnings; so the fancy demands that the old order shall end and some better, new fashion begin. I suppose everybody has had the vague sense of disappointment that the new month or the new year is so like the one before. I used to feel this very strongly as a child, though never unhappily. It was a disappointment, but as all times were happy times, the disappointment was not bitter. The thought is in my mind to-night because I am troubled, and because I would so gladly leave the fret and worry behind, to begin afresh with the new month.

The thought of Tom and his trouble weighs on me so that I have been miserable all day. Miss Charlotte has not been here this week. Her beloved plants need attention, and she is doing mysterious things with clippers and trowels, selecting bulbs, sorting out seeds, making plans for her garden beds, and working herself into a delightful fever of excitement over the coming glories of her garden. It is really rather early, I think, but in her impatience she cannot wait. Her flowers are her children, and all her affection for family and kin, having nothing nearer to cling to, is lavished on them. It is so fortunate that she has this taste. I cannot help to-day feeling so old and lonely that I could almost envy her her fondness for gardening. I must cultivate a taste for something, if it is only for cats. I wonder how Peter would like to have me set up an asylum for crippled and impoverished tabbies!

Over and over again I have asked myself what I can do to help Deacon Webbe, but I have found no answer. One of the hardest things in life is to see our friends bear the consequences of their mistakes. Deacon Daniel is suffering for the way he brought Tom up, and yet he has done as well as he was able. Father used to say what I declared was a hard saying, and which was the harder because in my heart of hearts I could never with any success dispute it. "You cannot wisely help anybody until you are willing not to interfere with the discipline that life and nature give," he said. "You would not offer to take a child's medicine for it; why should you try to bear the brunt of a friend's suffering when it comes from his own fault? That is nature's medicine." I remember that once I answered I would very gladly take a child's medicine for it if I could, and Father laughed and pinched my ear. "Don't try to be Providence," he said. I would like to be Providence for Deacon Webbe and Tom now,—and for the girl, too. It makes me shiver to think of her, and if I had to see or to touch her, it would be more than I could endure.

This moralizing shows that I am low in my mind. I have been so out of sorts that I was completely out of key to-day with George. I have had to see him often about the estate, but he has seemed always anxious to get away as quickly as possible. To-day he lingered almost in the old fashion; and I somehow found him altered. He is—I cannot tell how he is changed, but he is. He has a manner less—

It is time to stop writing when I own the trouble to be my own wrong-headedness and then go on to set down imaginary faults in my neighbors.

April 3. I am beset with deacons lately. Deacon Richards has been here for an hour, and he has left me so restless that I may as well try to write myself into calmness.

Deacon Richards never seems so big as when he stands talking with me, looking down on the top of my head, with his great bald forehead looming above his keen eyes like a mountain-top. I always get him seated as soon as I can, and he likes to sit in Father's wide arm-chair. One of the things that I like best about him is that, brusque and queer as he is, he never takes that seat until he has been especially asked. Then as he sits down he says always, with a little softening of his great voice,—

"This was your father's chair."

He has never been out of Tuskamuck a fortnight, I dare say; but there is something about this simple speech, ready for it as I of course always am, that almost brings the tears to my eyes. He is country born and country bred, but the delicacy of the courtesy underlying his brusqueness is pure gold. What nonsense it is for Cousin Mehitable to insist that we are too countrified to have any gentlemen! She does not appreciate the old New England stock.

What Deacon Daniel wanted I could not imagine, but while we were talking of the weather and the common things of the day I could see that he was preparing to say something. He has a wonderful smile when he chooses to show it. It always reminds me of the picture one sees sometimes of a genial face peering from behind a glum mask. When I teased him about the vestry fires, he only grinned; but his grin is to his smile as the smell of peppermint to that of a rose. He amused me by his comments of Aunt Naomi.

"She runs after gossip," he said, "just as a kitten runs after its tail. It doesn't mean anything, but it must do something."

"She is a shrewd creature," I answered. "It is absurd enough to compare anybody so decorous to a kitten."

"Aunt Naomi's nobody's fool," was his response. "She sent me here to-night."

"Sent you here?" I echoed.

His face grew suddenly grave.

"I don't know how this thing will strike you, Miss Ruth," he said explosively. "It seems to me all wrong. The fact is," he added more calmly, but with the air of meaning to have a disagreeable thing over, "it's about the Brownrig girl. You know about her, and that she is very sick."

"Yes," I said.

He stretched out his large hand toward the fire in a way that showed he was not at ease. I could not help noticing the difference between the hand of this Deacon Daniel and that of the other. Deacon Webbe is a farmer, and has a farmer's hand. Deacon Richards has the white hand of a miller.

"I don't see myself," he said grimly, looking into the coals, "that there is likely to be anything contagious in her wickedness, but none of the women are willing to go near her. I should think she'd serve pretty well as a warning. The Overseers of the Poor 've sent old Marm Bagley to nurse her, and that seems to be their part; but who's to look out that Marm Bagley doesn't keep drunk all the time's more than I can see."

He sniffed scornfully, as if his opinion of women was far from flattering.

"How did you know about it?" I asked.

"Job Pearson—he's one of the Overseers—came to see if there wasn't somebody the church could send down. I went to Aunt Naomi, but she couldn't think of anybody. She's housed with a cold, and she wouldn't be the one to go into a sick-room anyway."

"And she sent you here?"

He turned to me with the smile which I can never resist.

"The truth is," he answered, "that when there's nothing else to do we all come to you, Miss Ruth."

"But what can I do?"

"That is what I came to see."

"Did you expect me to go down and nurse the girl?"

He looked at me with a shrewd twinkle in his eye, and for a moment said nothing.

"I just expected if there was anything possible to be done you'd think of it," he replied.

I thought for a moment, and then I told him I would write to Cousin Mehitable to send down a trained nurse from Boston.

"The Overseers won't pay her," he commented with a grin.

"Perhaps you will," I returned, knowing perfectly that he was trying to tease.

"It will take several days at least to get her here."

We considered for a little in silence. I do not know what passed through his mind, but I thought with a positive sickening of soul of being under the same roof with that girl. I knew that it must be done, though; and, simply to be rid of the dread of it, I said as steadily as I could,—

"I will go down in the morning."

And so it has come about that I am to be nurse to the Brownrig girl and to Tom Webbe's baby.

April 6. The last four days have been so full and so exhausting that there has been no time for scribbling in diaries. Like Pepys I have now to write up the interval, although I cannot bring myself to his way of dating things as if he always wrote on the very day on which they happened. Father used to laugh at me because I always insisted that it was not honest of Pepys to put down one date when he really wrote on another.

Tuesday forenoon I went down to the Brownrig house. I had promised myself not to let the sick girl see how I shrank from her, but I had a sensation of sickening repugnance almost physical. When I got to the red house I was so ashamed of myself that I forgot everything else. The girl was so sick, the place so cheerless, so dirty, so poverty-stricken; she was so dreadful to look at, with her tangled black hair, her hot cheeks, her fierce eyes; everything was so miserable and dreadful, that I could have cried with pity. Julia was in a bed so dirty that it would have driven me to distraction; the pillow-slip was ragged, and the comforter torn in great places, as if a wild cat had clawed it. Marm Bagley was swaying back and forth in an old broken rocking-chair, smoking a black pipe, which perhaps she thought fumigated the foul air of the sick-room. She had the appearance of paying very little attention to the patient and none at all to the baby, which wailed incessantly from a shabby clothes-basket in a corner. The whole scene was so sordid, so pitiful, so hopeless, that I could think only of the misery, and so forget my shrinking and dread.

A Munson boy, that the Overseers of the Poor had sent down, was chopping wood in the yard, and I dispatched him to the house for Hannah and clean linen, while I tried to get Marm Bagley to attend to the baby and to help me to put things to rights a little. She smelled of spirits like another Sairey Gamp, and her wits did not appear to be entirely steady. After I found her holding the baby under her arm literally upside down, while she prepared its food, I decided that unless I wished to run the risk of being held as accessory to the murder of the infant, I had better look after it myself.

"Can't you pick up the room a little while I feed the baby?" I asked.

"Don't see no use of clearing up none," she said. "'Tain't time for the funeral yet."

This, I suppose, was some sort of an attempt at a rudimentary joke, but it was a most ghastly one. I looked at the sick girl to see if she heard and understood. It was evident that she had, but it seemed to me that she did not care. I went to the bedside.

"I ought to have spoken to you when I came in," I said, "but your eyes were shut, and I thought you might be asleep. I am Miss Privet, and I have come to help Mrs. Bagley take care of you till a regular nurse can get here from Boston."

She looked at me with a strange sparkle in her eyes.

"From Boston?" she repeated.

"Yes," I said. "I have sent to my cousin to get a regular trained nurse."

She stared at me with her piercing eyes opened to their fullest extent.

"Do they train 'em?" she asked.

"Yes," I told her. "A trained nurse is almost as good as a doctor."

"Then I shall get well?" she demanded eagerly. "She'll get me well?"

"I hope so," I said, with as much of a smile as I could muster when I wanted to cry. "And before she comes we must clear up a little."

I began to do what I could about the room without making too much bustle. The girl watched me with eager eyes, and at last, as I came near the bed, she asked suddenly,—

"Did he send you?"

I felt myself growing flushed, though there was no reason for it.

"Deacon Richards asked me to come," I answered.

"I don't know him," she commented, evidently confused. "Is he Overseer?"

I hushed her, and went on with my work, for I wanted to think what I had better tell her. Of course Marm Bagley was of no use, but when Hannah came things went better. Hannah was scandalized at my being there at all, and of course would not hear of my doing the rough work. She took possession of Mrs. Bagley, and ordered her about with a vigor which completely dazed that unsatisfactory person, and amused me so much that my disturbed spirits rose once more. This was all very well as long as it lasted, but Hannah had to go home for dinner, and when the restraint of her presence was removed Marm Bagley reasserted herself. She tied a frowzy bonnet over a still more frowzy head, lighted her pipe, and departed for the woods behind the house.

"When that impudent old hired girl o' yours's got all through and got out," she remarked, "you can hang a towel out the shed winder, and I'll come back. I ain't got no occasion to stay here and git ordered round by no hired girl of anybody's."

My remonstrances were of no avail, since I would not promise not to let Hannah come into the house, and the fat old woman waddled away into the seclusion of the woods. I suppose she slept somewhere, though the woods must be so damp that the indulgence seems rather a dangerous one; but at nightfall she returned more odorous, and more like Sairey Gamp than ever.

Hannah came back, and we did what we could. When Dr. Wentworth came in the afternoon he allowed us to get Julia into clean linen, and she did seem grateful for the comfort of fresh sheets and pillow-slips. It amused me that Hannah had not only taken the servants' bedding, but had picked out the oldest.

"I took the wornest ones," she explained. "Of course we wouldn't any of us ever want to sleep in them again."

She was really shocked at my proposing to remain for the night.

"It ain't for you, Miss Ruth, to be taking care of such folks," she declared; "and as for that Bagley woman, I'd as soon have a bushel basket of cockroaches in the house as her, any time."

Even this lively image did not do away with the necessity of my remaining. I could not propose to Hannah to take my place. The mere fact of being mistress often forces one to do things which servants would feel insulted if asked to undertake. Father used to say, "Remember that noblesse oblige does not exist in the kitchen;" though of course this is true only in a sense. Servants have their own ideas of what is due to position, I am sure; only that their ideas are so different, and often so funnily different, from ours. I could not leave the sick girl to the mercies of Mrs. Bagley, and so I had no choice but to stay.

All day long Julia watched me with a closeness most strangely disconcerting. She evidently could not make out why I was there. In the evening, as I sat by her, she said suddenly,—

"I dunno what you think yer'll get by it."

"Get by what?"

"Bein' here."

I smiled at her manner, and told her that at least I had already got the satisfaction of seeing her more comfortable. She made no reply for a time, but evidently was considering the matter. I did not think it well for her to talk, so I sat knitting quietly, while Mrs. Bagley loomed in the background, rocking creakingly.

"'Twon't please him none," she said at last. "He don't care a damn for me."

I tried to take this without showing that I understood it.

"I'm not trying to please anybody," I responded. "When a neighbor is sick and needs help, of course anybody would come."

"Humph! Folks hain't been so awful anxious to help me."

"There is a good deal of sickness in town," I explained.

"'Tain't nobody's business to come, anyhow," commented Mrs. Bagley dispassionately.

"There's precious few'd come if 'twas," the girl muttered.

"Has anybody been to see you?" I asked.

The Brownrig girl turned her fierce eyes up to me with a look which made me think of some wild bird hurt and caged.

"One old woman that sat and chewed her veil and swung her foot at me. She never come but once."

I had no difficulty in recognizing this portrait, even without Mrs. Bagley's explanatory comment.

"That was Aunt Naomi Dexter," she remarked. "She's always poking round."

"Miss Dexter is one of the kindest women alive," I said, "though she is a little odd in her manner sometimes."

"She said she hoped I'd found things bad enough to give me a hankerin' for something better," went on Julia with increasing bitterness. "God! How does she think I'd get anything better? What does she know about it, anyway?"

"There, there, Jule," interposed Mrs. Bagley in a sort of professional tone, "now don't go to gettin' excited and rampageous. You know she brought you some rippin' flannel for the baby. Them pious folks has to talk, but, Lord, nobody minds it, and you hadn't ought ter. They don't really mean nothing much."

It seemed to be time to interpose, and I forbade Julia to talk, sent Mrs. Bagley off to sleep in the one other bedroom, and settled down for the night's watching. The patient fell asleep at last, and I was left to care for the fire and the poor little pathetic, forlorn, dreadful baby. The child was swathed in Aunt Naomi's "rippin' flannel," and I fell into baffling reflections in regard to human life. After all, I had no right to judge this poor broken girl lying there much more in danger than she could dream. What do I know of the intolerable life that has not self-respect, not even cleanliness of mind or body? Society and morality have so fenced us about and so guarded us that we have rather to try to get outside than to struggle to keep in; and what do we know of the poor wretches fighting for life with wild beasts in the open? I am so glad I do not believe that sin is what one actually does, but is the proportion between deeds and opportunity. How carefully Father explained this to me when I was not much more than a child, and how strange it is that so many people cannot seem to understand it! If I thought the moral law an inflexible thing like a human statute, for which one was held responsible arbitrarily and whether he knows the law or not, I should never be able to endure the sense of injustice. Of course men have to be arbitrary, because they can see only tangible things and must judge by outward acts; but if this were true of a deity he would cease to be a deity at all, and be simply a man with unlimited power to do harm.

April 7. I found myself so running aground last night in metaphysics that it seemed just as well to go to bed, diary or no diary. I was besides too tired to write down my interview with Mrs. Webbe.

I was just about to go home for a bath and a nap after watching that first night, when, without even knocking, Mrs. Deacon Webbe opened the outside door. I was in the kitchen, and so met her before she got further. Naturally I was surprised to see her at six o'clock in the day.

"Good-morning," I said.

"I knew you were here yesterday," she said by way of return for my greeting, "but I thought I'd get here before you came back this morning."

"I have been here all night," I answered.

She looked at me with her piercing black eyes, which always seem to go into the very recesses of one's thoughts, and then, in a manner rather less aggressive, remarked,—

"I've come to speak to this Brownrig girl. You know well enough why."

"I'm afraid you can't see her," I answered, ignoring the latter part of her words. "She is not so well this morning, and Dr. Wentworth told us to keep her as quiet as possible."

Mrs. Webbe leaned forward with an expression on her face which made me look away.

"Is she going to die?" she demanded.

I turned away, and began to close the door. I could not bear her manner. She has too much cause to hate the girl, but just then, with the poor thing sick to the very point of death, I could never have felt as she looked.

"I'm sure I hope not," I returned. "We expect to have a professional nurse to-morrow, and then things will go better."

"A professional nurse?"

"Yes; we have sent to Boston for one."

"Sent to Boston for a nurse for that creature? She's a great deal better dead! She only leads men"—

"If you will excuse me, Mrs. Webbe," interrupted I, pushing the door still nearer to closing, "I ought to go back to my patient. It isn't my business to decide who had better be dead."

She started forward suddenly, taking me unawares, and before I understood what she intended, she had thrust herself through the door into the house.

"If it isn't your business," she demanded sharply, "what are you here for? What right have you to interfere? If Providence is willing to take the creature out of the way, what are you trying to keep her alive for?"

I put up my hand and stopped her.

"Will you be quiet?" I said. "I cannot have her disturbed."

"You cannot!" she repeated, raising her voice. "Who gave you a right to order me round, Ruth Privet? Is this your house?"

I knew that her shrill voice would easily penetrate to Julia's bedroom, and indeed there was only a thin door between the sick girl and the kitchen where we were. I took Mrs. Webbe by the wrist as strongly as I could, and before she could collect her wits, I led her out of the house, and down to the gate.

"What are you doing?" she demanded. "How dare you drag me about?"

"I beg your pardon," I said, dropping my hold. "I think you did not understand, Mrs. Webbe, that as nurse I cannot have my patient excited."

She looked at me in a blaze of anger. I have never seen a woman so carried away by rage, and it is frightful. Yet she seemed to be making an effort to control herself. I was anxious to help her if I could, so I forced a smile, although I am afraid it was not a very warm one, and I assumed as conciliatory a manner as I could muster.

"You must think I was rather abrupt," I said, "but I did not mean to be. I couldn't explain to you in the kitchen, the partition is so thin. You see she's in the room that opens out of it."

Mrs. Webbe softened somewhat.

"It is very noble of you to be here," she said in a new tone, and one which I must confess did not to me have a genuine ring; "it's splendid of you, but what's the use of it? What affair of yours is it, anyway?"

I was tempted to serve her up a quotation about a certain man who went down to Jericho and fell among thieves, but I resisted.

"I could come, Mrs. Webbe, and apparently nobody else could."

"They wouldn't," she rejoined frankly. "Don't you see everybody else knew it was a case to be let alone?"

I asked her why.

"Everybody felt as if it was," responded she quickly. "I hope you don't set up to be wiser than everybody else put together."

"I don't set up for anything," I declared, "but I may as well confess that I see no sense in what you say. Here's a human creature that needs help, and it seems to be my place to help her."

"It's a nice occupation for the daughter of Judge Privet to be nursing a disreputable thing like a Brownrig."

"A Privet," I answered, "is likely to be able to stand it. You wouldn't let the girl die alone, would you?"

"She wasn't alone. Mrs. Bagley was here."

"You wouldn't let her die with Mrs. Bagley, then?"

Mrs. Webbe looked me straight in the eye for a moment, with a look as hard as polished steel.

"Yes," she said, "I would."

I could only stare at her in silence.

"There," she went on, "make the best of that. I'm not going to be mealy-mouthed. I would let her die, and be glad of it. Why should I want her alive? Do you think I've no human feelings? Do you think I'd ever forgive her for dragging Tom into the mud? I've been on my knees half the night praying she and her brat might both die and leave us in peace! If there's any justice in heaven, a man like Deacon Webbe won't be loaded down with the disgrace of a grandchild like that."

There was a sort of fascination in her growing wildness. Everybody knows how she sneers at the meekness of her husband, and that she is continually saying he hasn't any force, but here she was catching at his goodness as a sort of bribe to Heaven to let her have the life of mother and child. I could not answer her, but could only be thankful no houses were near. Mrs. Bagley would hear, I supposed, but that could not be helped.

"What do you know about how I feel?" she demanded, swooping down upon me so that I involuntarily shrank back against the fence. "It is all very pretty for you to have ideas of charity, and play at taking care of the sick. I dare say you mean well enough, Miss Privet, but this isn't a case for you. Go home, and let Providence take care of that girl. God'll look after her!"

I stood up straight, and faced her in my turn.

"Stop!" I cried. "I'm not a believer in half the things you are, but I do have some respect for the name of God. If you mean to kill this girl, don't try to lay the blame on Providence!"

She shrank as if I had struck her; then she rallied again with a sneer.

"I think I know better than an atheist what it is right to say about my own religion," was her retort.

Somehow the words appealed to my sense of humor, and unconsciously I smiled.

"Well," I said, "we will not dispute about words. Only I think you had better go now."

Perhaps my slight smile vexed her; perhaps it was only that she saw I was off my guard. She turned quickly, and before I had any notion of what she intended, she had run swiftly up the path to the house. I followed instantly. The idea of having a personal encounter with Mrs. Webbe was shocking, but I could not let her go to trouble Julia without making an effort to stop her. I thought I might reach the door first, but she was too quick for me. Before I could prevent her, she had crossed the kitchen and opened the door of the sick-room. I followed, and we came almost together into the room, although she was a few steps in advance. She went hastily to the bed. Julia had been awakened by the noise, and stared at Mrs. Webbe in a fright.

"Oh, here you are, are you?" Mrs. Webbe began. "How did you dare to say that my son was the father of your brat? I'd like to have you whipped, you nasty slut!"

"Mrs. Webbe," I said resolutely, "if you do not leave the house instantly, I will have you arrested before the sun goes down."

She was diverted from her attack upon Julia, and wheeled round to me.

"Arrested!" she echoed. "You can't do it."

"I can do it, and you know me well enough to know that if I say it, I mean it. I'm not a lawyer's daughter for nothing. Go out of the house this instant, and leave that sick girl alone. Do you want to kill her?"

She blazed at me with eyes that might have put me to flight if I had had only myself to defend.

"Do you think I want her to live? I told you once she ought to be out of the way. Do you think you are doing a favor to Tom by keeping this disreputable thing alive?"

I took her by the wrist again.

"You had better go," I said. "You heard what I said. I mean it."

I confess that now I consider it all, the threat to have her arrested seems rather silly, and I do not see how I could well have carried it out. At the moment it appeared to me the simplest thing in the world, and at least it effected my purpose to frighten Mrs. Webbe with the law. She turned slowly toward the door, but as she went she looked over her shoulder at Julia.

"You are a nice thing to try to keep alive," she sneered. "The doctor says you haven't a chance, and you'd better be making your peace with God. I wouldn't have your heap of sins on my head for anything."

I put my hand over her lips.

"Mrs. Bagley," I said, "take her other arm."

Mrs. Bagley, who had apparently been too confused to understand what was going on, and had stood with her mouth wide open in blear-eyed astonishment, did as I commanded, and we led Mrs. Webbe out of the room. I motioned Mrs. Bagley back into the bedroom to look after Julia, and shut the door behind her. Then I took Mrs. Webbe by the shoulders and looked her in the face.

"I had rather have that girl's sins on my head than yours," I said. "You came here with murder in your heart, and you would be glad to kill her outright, if you dared. If you have not murdered her as it is, you may be thankful."

I felt as if I was as much of a shrew as she, but something had to be done. She looked as if she were as much astonished as impressed, but she went. Only at the door she turned back to say,—

"I'll come again to see my grandchild."

After that I hardly dared to leave the house, but I got Hannah to stand guard while I was at home. She has a deep-seated dislike for Mrs. Webbe, and I fear would greatly have enjoyed an encounter with her; but Mrs. Webbe did not return.

Now that I go over it all, I seem to have been engaged in a disreputable squabble, but I do not see what else there was for me to do. Julia was so terrified and excited that I had to send for Dr. Wentworth as soon as I could find anybody to go. I set Mrs. Bagley to watch for a passer, and she took her pipe and went placidly to sleep before the door. I had to be with Julia, yet keep running out to spy for a messenger, and it was an hour before I caught one. By the time the doctor got to us the girl was in hysterics, declaring she did not want to die, she did not dare to die, could not, would not die. All that day she was constantly starting out of her sleep with a cry; and by the time night had come, I began to feel that Mrs. Webbe would have her wish.

April 8. That night was a dreadful one to me. The nurse from Boston had not come, and I could not leave the girl alone with Mrs. Bagley. Indeed Marm Bagley seemed more and more inefficient. I think she took advantage of the fact that she no longer felt any responsibility. The smell of spirits and tobacco about her grew continually stronger, and I was kept from sending her away altogether only by the fact that it did not seem right for me to be alone with Julia. No house is near, and if anything happened in the night I should have been without help. Julia was evidently worse. The excitement of Mrs. Webbe's visit had told on her, and whenever she went to sleep she began to cry out in a way that was most painful.

About the middle of the night, that dreadfully forlorn time when the day that is past has utterly died out and nothing shows the hope of another to come, Julia woke moaning and crying. She started up in bed, her eyes really terrible to see, her cheeks crimson with fever, and her black hair tangled all about her face.

"Oh, I am dying!" she shrieked.

For the instant I thought that she was right, and it was dreadful to hear her.

"I shall die and go to hell!" she cried. "Oh, pray! Pray!"

I caught at my scattered wits and tried to soothe her. She clung to me as if she were in the greatest physical terror.

"I am dying!" she kept repeating. "Oh, can't you do something for me? Can't you save me? Oh, I can't die! I can't die!"

She was so wild that her screams awakened Mrs. Bagley, who came running in half dressed, as she had lain down for the night.

"Lawk-a-marcy, child," she said, coming up to the bed, "if you was dying do you think you'd have strength to holler like that?"

The rough question had more effect than my efforts to calm the girl. She sank back on the pillow, sobbing, and staring at Mrs. Bagley.

"I ain't got no strength," she insisted. "I know I'm goin' to die right away."

"Nonsense, Jule," was Mrs. Bagley's response. "I know when folks is dyin', I guess. I've seen enough of 'um. You're all right if you'll stop actin' like a blame fool."

I see now that this was exactly the way in which the girl needed to be talked to. It was her own language, and she understood it. At the time it seemed to me brutal, and I interposed.

"There, Mrs. Bagley," I said as soothingly as I could, "you are rather hard on Julia. She is too sick to be talked to so."

Marm Bagley sniffed contemptuously, and after looking at us a moment, apparently decided that the emergency was not of enough importance to keep her from her rest, so she returned to her interrupted slumbers. I comforted my patient as well as I could, and fortunately she was not again violent. Still she moaned and cried, and kept urging me to pray for her.

"Pray for me! Pray for me!" she kept repeating. "Oh, can't you pray and keep me from hell, Miss Ruth?"

There was but one thing to be done. If prayer was the thing which would comfort her, evidently I ought to pray with her.

"I will pray if you will be quiet," I said. "I cannot if you go on like this."

"I'll be still, I'll be still," she cried eagerly. "Only pray quick!"

I kneeled down by the bed and repeated the Lord's Prayer as slowly and as impressively as I could. The girl, who seemed to regard it as a sort of spell against invisible terrors, clutched my hand with a desperate grasp, but as I went on the pressure of her hot fingers relaxed. Before I had finished she had fallen asleep as abruptly as she had awakened.

I sat watching her, thinking what a strange thing is this belief in prayer. The words I had said are beautiful, but I do not suppose this made an impression on Julia. To her the prayer was a fetich, a spell to ward her soul from the dark terrors of Satan, a charm against the powers of the air. I wondered if I should be happier if I could share this belief in the power of men to move the unseen by supplication, but I reflected that this would imply the continual discomfort of believing in invisible beings who would do me harm unless properly placated, and I was glad to be as I am. The faith of some Christians is so noble, so sweet, so tender, that it is not always easy to realize how narrowing are the conditions of mind which make it possible. When one sees the crude superstition of a creature like Julia, it is not difficult to be glad to be above a feeling so ignorant and degrading; when I see the beautiful tenderness of religion in its best aspect I am glad it can be so fine and so comforting, but I am glad I am not limited in that way.

My prayer with Julia had one unexpected result. While I was at home in the morning Mr. Thurston came to see her. The visit was most kind, and I think it did her good.

"He did some real praying," Mrs. Bagley explained to me afterward. "Course Jule'd rather have that."

My efforts in the devotional line had more effect, so far as I could judge, upon Mr. Thurston than upon Julia. I met him when I was going back to the house, and he stopped me with an expression of gladness and triumph in his face.

"My dear Miss Privet," he said, "I am so glad that at last you have come to realize the efficacy of prayer."

I was so astonished at the remark that for the moment I did not realize what he meant.

"I don't understand," I said, stupidly enough.

My look perhaps confused him a little, and his face lost something of its brightness.

"That poor girl told me of your praying with her last night, when she thought she was dying."

"Yes," I repeated, before I realized what I was saying, "she thought she was dying."

Then I reflected that it was useless to hurt his feelings, and I did not explain. I could not wound him by saying that if Julia had wanted me to repeat a gypsy charm and I had known one I should have done it in the same spirit. I wanted to make the poor demented thing comfortable, and if a prayer could soothe her there was no reason why I should not say one. People think because I do not believe in it I have a prejudice against prayer; but really I think there is something touching and noble in the attitude of a mind that can in sincerity and in faith give itself up to an ideal, as one must in praying. It seems to me a pathetic mistake, but I can appreciate the good side of it; only to suppose that I believe because I said a prayer to please a frightened sick girl is absurd.

It is well that we are not read by others, for our thoughts would often be too disconcerting. Poor Mr. Thurston would have been dreadfully horrified if he had realized I was thinking as we stood there how like my saying this prayer for Julia was to my ministering to Rosa's chilblains. She believes that crosses cut out of a leaf of the Bible and stuck on her feet take away the soreness, but she regards it as wicked to cut up a Bible. I have an old one that I keep for the purpose, and she comes to me every winter for a supply. We began at the end, and are going backwards. Revelation is about used up now. She evidently thinks that as I am a heretic anyway, the extra condemnation which must come from my act will make no especial difference, and I am entirely willing to run the risk. Still, it is better Mr. Thurston did not read my thought.

"I wish you might be brought into the fold," the clergyman said after a moment of silence.

I could only thank him, and go on my way.

April 10. Yesterday the new nurse, Miss Dyer, arrived, and great is the comfort of having her here. She is a plain, simple body, in her neat uniform, rather colorless except for her snapping black eyes. Her eyes are interestingly at variance with the calmness of her demeanor, and give one the impression that there is a volcano somewhere within. She interests me much,—largely, I fancy, from the suggestion about her of having had a history. She is swift and yet silent in her motions, and understands what she has to do so well that I felt like an awkward novice beside her. She disposed of Mrs. Bagley with a turn of the hand, as it were, somehow managing that the frowzy old woman was out of the house within an hour, with her belongings, pipe and all, yet without any fuss or any contention. Mrs. Bagley had the appearance of being too dazed to be angry, although I fancy when she has had time to think matters over she will be indignantly wrathful at having been so summarily expelled.

"I pity you more for having that sort of a woman in the house than for having to take care of the patient, Miss Privet," Miss Dyer said. "I don't see what the Lord permits such folks in the world for, without it is to sharpen up our Christian charity."

"She would sharpen mine into vinegar, I'm afraid," I answered, laughing. "I confess it has been about all I could do to stay in the house with her."

To-night I can sleep peacefully in my own bed, secure that Julia is well taken care of. The girl seems to me to be worse instead of better, and Dr. Wentworth does not give much encouragement. I suppose it is better for her to die, but it is cruel that she wants so to live. She is horribly afraid of death, and she wants so much to live that it is pitiful to reflect it is possible she may not. What is there she can hope for? She does not seem to care for the child. This is because she is so ill, I think, for anybody must be touched by the helplessness of the little blinking, pink thing. It is like a little mouse I saw in my childhood, and which made a great impression on me. That was naked of hair, just so wrinkled, so pink, so blinking. It was not in the least pretty, any more than the baby is; but somehow it touched all the tenderness there was in me, and I cried for days because Hannah gave it to the cat. I feel much in the same way about this baby. I have not the least feeling toward it as a human being, I am afraid. To me it is just embodied babyhood, just a little pink, helpless, palpitating bunch of pitifulness.

April 11. Miss Dyer came just in time. I could not have gone through to-night without her, I think. I could not have stayed quiet by Julia's beside, although I am as far as possible from being able to sleep.

To-night, just as the evening was falling, and I was almost ready to come home, I heard a knock at the door. Miss Dyer was in the room with Julia, so I answered the knock myself. I opened the door to find myself face to face with Tom Webbe.

The shock of seeing his white face staring at me out of the dusk was so great that I had to steady myself against the door-post. He did not put out his hand, but greeted me only by taking off his hat.

"Father said you were here," he began, in a strained voice.

"Yes," I answered, feeling my throat contract; "I am here now, but I am going home soon."

I was so moved and so confused that I could not think. I had longed for him to come; I could not have borne that he should have been so base as not to come; and yet now that he was here I would have given anything to have him away. He had to come; he had to bear his part of the consequences of wrong, but it was horrible to me for him to be so near that dreadful girl, and it was worse because I pitied her, because she was so helpless, so pathetic, so near even to death.

We stood in the dusk for what seemed to me a long time without further speech. Tom must have found it hard to know what to say at such a time. He looked at me with a sort of wild desperation. Then he cleared his throat, and moistened his lips.

"I have come," he said. "What do you want me to do?"

I could not bear to have him seem to put the responsibility on me.

"I did not send for you," I answered quickly.

He gave me the wan ghost of a smile.

"Do you suppose that I should have come of myself?" he returned. "What shall I do?"

I would not take the burden. The decision must be his.

"You must do what you think right," I said. Then I added, with a queer feeling as if I were thinking aloud, "What you think right to her and to—to the baby."

His face darkened, and I was glad that I had not said "your baby." I understood it was natural for him to look angry at the thought of the child, the unwelcome and unwitting betrayer of what he would have kept hidden; and yet somehow I resented his look.

"The baby is not to blame, Tom," I said. "It has every right to blame you."

"To blame me?" he repeated.

"If it has to bear a shame all its life, whose fault is it, its own or yours? If it has been born to a life like that of its mother, it certainly has no occasion to thank you."

He turned his flushed and shamed face away from me, and looked out into the darkening sky. I could see how he was holding himself in check, and that it was hard for him. I hated to be there, to be seeing him, to be talking over a matter that it was intolerable even to think about; but since I was there, I wanted to help him,—only I did not know how. I wanted to give him my hand, but I somehow shrank from touching his. I felt as if it was wicked and cruel to hold back, but between us came continually the consciousness of Julia and that little red baby sleeping in the clothes-basket. I am humiliated now to think of it, but the truth is that I was a brute to Tom.

Suddenly Tom turned for a moment toward the west, so that the little lingering light of the dying day fell on his face, and I saw by his set lips and the look in his eyes that he had come to some determination. Then he faced me slowly.

"Ruth," he said, "I would go down into hell for you, and I'm going to do something that is worse. What's past, it's no use to make excuses for, and you're too good to understand if I told you how I got into this foul mess. Now"—

He stopped, with a catch in his voice, and I wanted more than I can tell to say something to help him, but no words came. I could not think; I wanted to comfort him as I comfort Kathie when she is desperate. The evident difficulty he had in keeping his self-control moved me more than anything he could have said.

"I'll marry the girl," he burst out in a moment. "You are right about the baby. It's no matter about Jule. She isn't of any account anyway, and she never expected me to marry her. I'll never see her after she's—after I've done it. It makes me sick to think of her, but I'll do what I can for the baby." He stopped, and caught his breath. I could feel in the dusk, rather than see, that he looked up, as if he were trying to read my face in the darkness. "I will marry her," he went on, "on one condition."

"What is that?" I asked, with my throat so dry that it ached.

"That you will take the child."

I think now that we must both have spoken like puppets talking by machinery. I hardly seemed to myself to be alive and real, but this proposition awoke me like a blow. I could at first only gasp, too much overcome to bring out a word.

"But its mother?" I managed to stammer at last.

"If I'm to marry her for the sake of the child," he answered in a voice I hardly recognized, "it would be perfect tomfoolery to leave it to grow up with the Brownrigs. If that's to be the plan, I'll save myself. Jule doesn't mind not being married. You don't know what a tribe the Brownrigs are. It's an insult for me to be talking to you about them, only it can't be helped. Is it a boy or a girl?"

I told him.

"And you think a girl ought to be left to follow the noble example of the mother!"

"Oh no, no!" I cried out. "Anything is better than that."

"That is what must happen unless you take the poor thing," he said in a voice which, though it was hard, seemed somehow to have a quiver in it.

"But would she give the baby up?" I asked. "She's its mother."

"Jule? She'll be only too glad to get rid of it. Anyway she'd do what I told her to."

I tried to think clearly and quickly. To have the baby left to follow in the steps of its mother was a thing too terrible to be endured, and yet I shrank selfishly from taking upon my shoulders the responsibility of training the child. Whatever Tom decided about the marriage, however, I felt that he should not have to resolve under pressure. If he were doing it for the sake of the baby's future, I could clear his way of that complication. I could not bear the thought of having Tom marry Julia. This would be a bond on his whole life; and yet I could not feel that he had a right to shirk it now. If I agreed to take the child, that would leave him free to decide without being pushed on by fear about the baby. My mind seemed to me wonderfully clear. I see now it was all in a whirl, and that the only thing I was sure of was that if it would help him for me to take the baby there was nothing else for me to do.

"Tom," I said, "I do not, and I will not, decide for you; and I will not have anything to do with conditions. If she will give me the baby, I will take it, and you may decide the rest without any reference to that at all."

He took a step forward so quickly and so fiercely that he startled me, and put out his hand as if he meant to take me by the arm. Then he dropped it.

"Do you think," he said, "that I would have an illegitimate brat near you? It is bad enough as it is, but you shall not have the reproach of that."

My cheeks grew hot, but the whole talk was so strange and so painful that I let this pass with the rest. I cannot tell how I felt, but I know the remembrance of it makes my eyes swim so that I cannot write without stopping continually; and I am writing here half the night because I cannot sleep. I could not answer Tom; I only stood dully silent until he spoke again.

"I know I can't have you, Ruth," he said, "and I know you were right. I'm not good enough for you."

"I never said that," I interrupted. "I never thought that."

"Never mind. It's true; but I'd have been a man if you'd have given me a chance."

"Oh, Tom," I broke in, "don't! It is not fair to make me responsible!"

"No," he acknowledged, with the shake of his shoulders I have known ever since we were children; "you are not to blame. It's only my infernal, sneaking self!"

I could not bear this, either. Everything that was said hurt me; and it seemed to me that I had borne all that I could endure.

"Will you go away now, Tom," I begged him. "I—I can't talk any more to-night. Shall I tell Julia you have come?"

He gave a start at the name, and swore under his breath.

"It is damnable for you to be here with that girl," he burst out bitterly; "and I brought it on you! It isn't your place, though. Where are all the Christians and church members? I suppose all the pious are too good to come. They might get their righteousness smudged. Oh, how I hate hypocrisy!"

"Don't, Tom," I interrupted. "Go away, please."

My voice was shaky; and indeed I was fast getting to the place where I should have broken down in hysterical weeping.

"I'll go," he responded quickly. "I'll come in the morning with a minister. Will eight o'clock do? I'd like to get it over with."

The bitterness of his tone was too much for me. I caught one of his hands in both of mine.

"Oh, Tom," I said, "are you quite sure this is what you ought to do?"

"Do you tell me not to marry her?" he demanded fiercely.

I was completely unnerved; I could only drop his hand and press my own on my bosom, as if this would help me to breathe easier.

"Oh no, no," I cried, half sobbing. "I can't, I can't. I haven't the right to say anything; but I do think it is the thing you ought to do. Only you are so noble to do it!"

He made a sound as if he would answer, and then he turned away suddenly, and dashed off with great strides. I could not go back into the house, but came home without saying good-night, or letting Miss Dyer know. I must be ready to go back as soon as it is light.

April 12. It seems so far back to this morning that I might have had time to change into a different person; and yet most of the day I have simply been longing to get home and think quietly. I wanted to adjust myself to the new condition of things. Last night the idea that Tom should marry the girl was so strange and unreal that it could make very little impression on me. Now it is done it is more appallingly real than anything else in the world.

I went down to the red house almost before light, but even as early as I came I found Tom already there. The nurse had objected to letting him in, and even when I came she was evidently uncertain whether she had done right in admitting him; but Tom has generally a way of getting what he is determined on, and before I reached the house everything had been arranged with Julia.

"I wanted to come before folks were about to see me," Tom said to me. "There'll be talk enough later, and I'd rather be out of the way. I've arranged it with her."

"Does she understand"—I began; but he interrupted.

"She understands all there is to understand; all that she could understand, anyway. She knows I'm marrying her for the sake of the child, and that you're to have it."

The Munson boy that I have hired to sleep in the house now Mrs. Bagley is gone, in order that Miss Dyer may have somebody within call, appeared at this minute with a pail of water, and we were interrupted. The boy stared with all his eyes, and I was half tempted to ask him not to speak of Tom's being here; but I reflected with a sick feeling that it was of no use to try to hide what was to be done. If Tom's act was to have any significance it must be known. I turned away with tears in my eyes, and went to Julia.

Julia I found with her eyes shining with excitement, and I could see that despite Tom's idea that she did not care about the marriage, she was greatly moved by it.

"Oh, Miss Privet," she cried out at once, "ain't he good! He's truly goin' to marry me after all! I never 'sposed he'd do that."

"You must have thought"—I began; and then, with a sinking consciousness of the difference between her world and mine, I stopped.

"And he says you want the baby," she went on, not noticing; "though I dunno what you want of it. It'll be a pesky bother for yer."

"Mr. Webbe wanted me to take it and bring it up."

"Well," Julia remarked with feeble dispassionateness, "I wouldn't 'f I was you."

"Are you willing I should have it?" I asked.

"Oh, I'm willing anything he wants," was her answer. "He's awful good to marry me. He never said he would. He's real white, he is."

She was quiet a moment, and then she broke out in a burst of joy.

"I never 'sposed I'd marry a real gentleman!" she cried.

Her shallow delight in marrying above her station was too pathetic to be offensive. I was somehow so moved by it that I turned away to hide my face from her; but she caught my hand and drew me back. Then she peered at me closely.

"You don't like it," she said excitedly. "You won't try to stop him?"

"No," I answered. "I think he ought to do it for the sake of his child."

She dropped her hold, and a curious look came into her face.

"That's what he said. Yer don't either of yer seem to count me for much."

I was silent, convicted to the soul that I had not counted her for much. I had accepted Tom's decision as right, not for the sake of this broken girl-mother, this castaway doomed to shame from her cradle, but for the sake purely of the baby that I was to take. It came over me how I might have been influenced too much by the selfish thought that it would be intolerable for me to have the child unless it had been as far as might be legitimatized by this marriage. I flushed with shame, and without knowing exactly what I was doing I bent over and kissed her.

"It is you he marries," I said.

Her tears sprang instantly, tears, I believe, of pure happiness.

"You're real good," she murmured, and then closed her eyes, whether from weakness or to conceal her emotion I could not be sure.

It was nearly eight before Mr. Thurston came. Tom has never been on good terms with Mr. Saychase, and it must have been easier for him to have a clergyman with whom he had never, I suppose, exchanged a word, than one who knew him and his people. I took the precaution to say at once to Mr. Thurston that Julia was too ill to bear much, and that he must not say a word more than was necessary.

"I will only offer prayer," he returned.

I know Mr. Thurston's prayers. I have heard them at funerals when I have been wickedly tempted to wonder whether he were not attempting to fill the interval between us and the return of the lost at the Resurrection.

"I am afraid it will not do," I told him. "You do not realize how feeble she is."

"Then I will only give them the blessing. Perhaps I might talk with Mr. Webbe afterward, or pray with him."

I knew that if this proposition were made to Tom he would say something which would wound the clergyman's feelings.

"Mr. Thurston," I urged, "if you'll pardon me, I wouldn't try to say anything to him just now. He is doing a plucky thing, and a thing that's noble, but it must be terribly hard. I don't think he could endure to have anybody talk to him. He'll have to be left to fight it out for himself."

It was not easy to convince Mr. Thurston, for when once a narrow man gets an idea of duty he can see nothing else; but I managed in the end to save Tom at least the irritation of having to fight off religious appeals. The ceremony was as brief as possible. It was touching to see how humble and yet how proud Julia was. She seemed to feel that Tom was a sort of god in his goodness in marrying her,—and after all perhaps she was partly right. His coldness only made her deprecatory. I wondered how far she was conscious of his evident shrinking from her. He seemed to hate even to touch her fingers. I cannot understand—

April 15. I have had many things to do in the last two days, and I find myself so tired with the stress of it all that I have not felt like writing. It is perhaps as much from a sort of feverish uneasiness as from anything else I have got out my diary to-night. The truth is, that I suffer from the almost intolerable suspense of waiting for Julia to die. Dr. Wentworth and Miss Dyer both are sure there is no chance whatever of her getting well, and I cannot think that it would be better for her, or for Tom, or for her baby—who is to be my baby!—if she should live. We are all a little afraid to say, or even to think, that it is better for a life of this sort to end, and I seem to myself inhuman in putting it down in plain words; but we cannot be rational without knowing that it is better certain persons should be out of the way, for their own sakes as well as for the good of the community, and the more quickly the better. Julia is a weed, poor thing, and the sooner she is pulled up the better for the garden. And yet I pity her so! I can understand religion easily when I think of lives like hers. It is so hard to see the justice of having the weed destroyed for the good of the flowers that men have to invent excuses for the Eternal. Somebody has defined theology as man's justification of a deity found wanting by human standards, and now I realize what this means. Human mercy could not bear to make a Julia, and a power which allows the possibility of such beings has to be excused to human reason. The gods that men invent always turn to Frankensteins on their hands. If there is a conscious power that directs, He must pity the gropings of our race, although I suppose seeing what it is all for and what it all leads to must make it possible to bear the sight of human weakness.

The baby is growing wonderfully attractive now she is so well fed and attended to. I am ashamed to think how little the poor wee morsel attracted me at first. She was so associated with dreadful thoughts, and with things which I hated to know and did not wish to remember, that I shrank from her. Perhaps now the fact that she is to be mine inclines me to look at her with different eyes, but she is really a dear little thing, pretty and sweet. Oh, I will try hard to make her life lovely!

April 16. Aunt Naomi came in last night almost as soon as I was at home. She should not have been out in the night air, I think, for her cold is really severe, and has kept her shut up in the house for a fortnight. She was so eager for news, however, that she could not rest until she had seen me, and I am away all day.

"Well," was her greeting, "I am glad to see you at home once more. I've begun to feel as if you lived down in that little red house."

I said I had pretty nearly lived there for the last two weeks, but that since Miss Dyer came I had been able to get home at night most of the time.

"How do you like going out nursing?" she asked, thrusting her tongue into her cheek in that queer way she has.

I told her I certainly shouldn't think of choosing it as a profession, at least unless I could go to cleaner places.

"I hear you had Hannah clean up," she remarked with a chuckle.

"How did you hear that?" I asked her. "I thought you had been housed with a cold."

Aunt Naomi's smile was broad, and she swung her foot joyously.

"I've had all my faculties," she answered.

"So I should think. You must keep a troop of paid spies."

"I don't need spies. I just keep my eyes and ears open."

I wondered in my heart whether she had heard of the marriage, and as if she read the question in my mind, she answered it.

"I thought I'd like to know one thing, though," she observed with the air of one who candidly concedes that he is not infallible. "I'd like to know how the new Mrs. Webbe takes his marrying her."

"Aunt Naomi," I burst out in astonishment, "you are a witch, and ought to be looked after by the witch-finders."

Aunt Naomi laughed, and her eyes twinkled at the agreeable compliment I paid to her cleverness. Then she suddenly became grave.

"I am not sure, Ruth," she said, "that I should be willing to have your responsibility in making him marry such a girl."

I disclaimed the responsibility entirely, and declared I had not even suggested the marriage. I told her he had done it for the sake of the child, and that the proposition was his, and his only.

She sniffed contemptuously, with an air which seemed to cast doubts on my sanity.

"Very likely he did, and I don't suppose you did suggest it in words; but it's your doing all the same."

"I will not have the responsibility put on me," I protested. "It isn't for me to determine what Tom Webbe shall do."

"You can't help it," was her uncompromising answer. "You can make him do anything you want to."

"Then I wish I were wise enough to know what he ought to do," I could not help crying out. "Oh, Aunt Naomi, I do so want to help him!"

She looked at me with her keen old eyes, to which age has only imparted more sharpness. I should hate to be a criminal brought before her as my judge; her eyes would bring out my guilty secret from the cunningest hiding-place in my soul, and she would sentence me with the utmost rigor of the law. After the sentence had been executed, though, she would come with sharp tongue and gentle hands, and bind up my wounds. Now she did not answer my remark directly, but went on to question me about the Brownrig girl and the details of her illness; only when she went away she stopped to turn at the door and say,—

"The best thing you can do for Tom Webbe is to believe in him. He isn't worth your pity, but your caring what happens to him will do him more good than anything else."

I have been wondering ever since she went how much truth there is in what she said. Tom cannot care so much for me as that, although placed as he is the faith of any woman ought to help him. I know, of course, he is fond of me, and that he was always desperate over my engagement; but I cannot believe the motive power of his life is so closely connected with my opinions as Aunt Naomi seems to think. If it were he would never have been involved at all in this dreadful business. But I do so pity him, and I so wish I might really help him!

April 18. Julia is very low. I have been sitting alone with her this afternoon, almost seeing life fade away from her. Only once was she at all like her old self. I had given her some wine, and she lay for a moment with her great black eyes gleaming out from the hollows into which they have sunk. She seemed to have something on her mind, and at last she put it feebly into words.

"Don't tell her any bad of me," she said.

For an instant I did not understand, and I suppose that my face showed this. She half turned her heavy head on her pillow, so that her glance might go toward the place where the baby slept in the broken clothes-basket. The sadness of it came over me so suddenly and so strongly that tears blinded me. It was the most womanly touch that I have ever known in Julia; and for the moment I was so moved that I could not speak. I leaned over and kissed her, and promised that from me her child should never know harm of its mother.

"She'd be more likely to go to the devil if she knew," Julia explained gaspingly. "Now she'll have some sort of a chance."

The words were coarse, but as they were said they were so pathetic that they pierced me. Poor little baby, born to a tainted heritage! I must save her clean little soul somehow. Poor Julia, she certainly never had any sort of a chance.

April 24. She is in her grave at last, poor girl, and it is sad to think that nobody alive regrets her. Tom cannot, and even her dreadful mother showed no sorrow to-day. Somehow the vulgarity of the mother and her behavior took away half the sadness of the tragedy. When I think about it the very coarseness of it all makes the situation more pathetic, but this is an afterthought that can be felt only when I have beaten down my disgust. When one considers how Julia grew up with this woman, and how she had no way of learning the decencies of life except from a mother who had no conception of them, it makes the heart ache; and yet when Mrs. Brownrig broke in upon us at the graveyard this morning, disgust was the strongest feeling of which I was conscious. The violation of conventionalities always shocks a woman, I suppose, and when it comes to anything so solemn as services over the dead, the lack of decency is shocking and exasperating together, with a little suggestion besides of sacrilege.

Miss Charlotte surprised me by coming over just after breakfast to go to the funeral with me.

"I don't like to have you go alone," she said, "and I knew you would go."

I asked her in some surprise how in the world she knew when the funeral was to be, for we thought that we had kept it entirely quiet.

"Aunt Naomi told me last night," she answered. "I suppose she heard it from some familiar spirit or other,—a black cat, or a toad, or something of the kind."

I could only say that I was completely puzzled to see how Aunt Naomi had discovered the hour in any other way, and I thanked Miss Charlotte for coming, though I told the dear she should not have taken so much trouble.

"I wanted to do it, my dear," she returned cheerfully. "I am getting to be an old thing, and I find funerals rather lively and amusing. Don't you remember Maria Harmon used to say that to a pious soul a funeral was a heavenly picnic?"

Whatever a "heavenly picnic" may be, the funeral this morning was one of the most ghastly things imaginable. Tom and Mr. Thurston were in one carriage and Miss Charlotte and I in another. We went to the graveyard at the Rim, where Julia's father and brother were buried, a place half overgrown with wild-rose and alder bushes. In summer it must be a picturesque tangle of wild shrubs and blossoms, but now it is only chill, and barren, and neglected. The spring has reddened and yellowed the tips of the twigs, but not enough to make the bushes look really alive yet. The heap of clay by the grave, too, was of a hideous ochre tint, and horribly sodden and oozy.

Just as the coffin was being lowered a wild figure suddenly appeared from somewhere behind the thickets of alders and low spruces which skirt the fence on one side. It proved to be old Mrs. Brownrig, who with rags and tags, and even her disheveled gray hair fluttering as she moved, half ran down the path toward us. She must have been hiding in the woods waiting, and I found afterward that she had been seen lurking about yesterday, though for some reason she had not been to her house. Now she had evidently been drinking, and she was a dreadful thing to look at.

I wonder why it is that nature, which makes almost any other ruin picturesque, never succeeds in making the wreck of humanity anything but hideous? An old tower, an old tree, even an old house, has somehow a quality that is prepossessing; but an old man is apt to look unattractive, and an old woman who has given up taking care of herself is repulsive. Perhaps we cannot see humanity with the impartial eyes with which we regard nature, but I do not think this is the whole of it. Somehow and for some reason an inanimate ruin is generally attractive, while a human ruin is ugly.

Mrs. Brownrig seemed to me an incarnation of the repulsive. She made me shudder with some sort of a feeling that she was wicked through and through. Even the pity she made me feel could not prevent my sense that she was vicious. I wanted to wash my hands just for having seen her. I was ashamed to be so uncharitable, and of course it was because she was so hideous to look at; but I do not think I could have borne to have her touch me.

"Stop!" she called out. "I'm the mother of the corpse. Don't you dare to bury her till I get there!"

I glanced at Tom in spite of myself. He had been stern and pale all the morning, not saying a word more than was necessary, but now the color came into his face all at once. I could not bear to see him, and tried to look at the mother, but repulsion and pity made me choke. She was panting with haste and intoxication by the time she reached us, and stumbled over something in the path. She caught at Tom's arm to save herself, and there she hung, leering up into his face.

"You didn't mean for me to come, did you?" she broke out, half whimpering and half chuckling. "She was mine before she was yours. You killed her, too."

Tom kept himself still, though it must have been terribly hard. He must have been in agony, and I could have sobbed to think how he suffered. He grew white as I have never seen him, but he did not look at the old woman. She was perhaps too distracted with drink and I hope with grief to know what she was doing. She turned suddenly, and looked at the coffin, which rested on the edge of the grave.

"My handsome Jule!" she wailed. "Oh, my handsome Jule! They're all dead now! What did you put on her? Did you make a shroud or put on a dress?"

"She has a white shroud," I said quickly. "I saw to everything myself."

She turned to me with a fawning air, and let go her clasp on Tom's arm.

"I'm grateful, Miss Privet," she said. "We Brownrigs ain't much, but we're grateful. I hope you won't let 'em bury my handsome gel till I've seen her," she went on, with a manner pitifully wheedling. "She was my gel before she was anybody else's, and it ain't goin' to hurt nobody for me to see her. I'd like to see that shroud."

How much natural grief, how much vanity, how much maudlin excitement was in her wish, I cannot tell; but manifestly there was nothing to do but to have the coffin opened. When the face of the dead woman had once more been uncovered to the light, the dreadful mother hung over it raving and chuckling. Now she shrieked for her handsome Jule, and wailed in a way that pierced to the marrow; then she would fall to imbecile laughter over the shroud, "just like a lady's,—but then Jule was a lady after she was married." Miss Charlotte, Tom, and I stood apart, while Mr. Thurston tried to get the excited creature away; and the grave-diggers looked on with open curiosity. I could not help thinking how they would tell the story, and of how Tom's name would be bandied about in connection with it. Sometimes I feel as if it were harder to bear the vulgarities of life than actual sorrows. Father used to say that pain is personal, but vulgarity a violation of general principles. This is one of his sayings which I do not feel that I understand entirely, and yet I have some sense of what he meant. A thing which is vulgar seems to fly in the face of all that should be, and outrages our sense of the fitness of things.

Well, somehow we got through it all. It is over, and Julia is in her grave. I cannot but think that it is better if she does not remember; if she has gone out like an ill-burning candle. Nothing is left now but to consider what can be done for the lives that we can reach. I am afraid that the mother is beyond me, but for Tom I can, perhaps, do something. For baby I should do much.

April 25. It is so strange to have a child in the house. I feel queer and disconcerted when I think of it, although things seem to go easily enough. The responsibility of taking charge of a helpless life overwhelms me, and I do not dare to let my thoughts go when they begin to picture possibilities in the future. I wonder that I ever dared to undertake to have baby; and yet her surroundings will be so much better here than with the dreadful Brownrig grandmother that she must surely be better for them. In any case I had to help Tom.

I proposed a permanent nurse for baby, but Hannah and Rosa took up arms at once, and all but upbraided me with having cast doubts on their ability and faithfulness. Surely we three women among us should be able to take care of one morsel, although none of us ever had babies of our own.

April 29. Nothing could be more absurd than the way in which the entire household now revolves about baby. All of us are completely slaves already, although the way in which we show it is naturally different. Rosa has surrendered frankly and without reservations. She sniffed and pouted at the idea of having the child "of that Brownrig creature" in the house. She did not venture to say this to me directly, of course; but she relieved her mind by making remarks to Hannah when I could not help hearing. From the moment baby came, however, Rosa succumbed without a struggle. It is evident she is born with the full maternal instinct, and I see if she does not marry her Dennis, or some more eligible lover, and take herself away before baby is old enough to be much affected, the child will be spoiled to an unlimited extent. As for Hannah, her method of showing her affection is to exhibit the greatest solicitude for baby's spiritual welfare, mingled with the keenest jealousy of Rosa's claims on baby's love. I foresee that I shall have pretty hard work to protect my little daughter from Hannah's well-meant but not very wise theology; and how to do this without hurting the good old soul's feelings may prove no easy problem.

As for myself—of course I love the little, helpless, pink thing; the waif from some outside unknown brought here into a world where everything is made so hard to her from the start. She woke this afternoon, and looked up at me with Tom Webbe's eyes, lying there as sweet and happy as possible, so that I had to kiss and cuddle her, and love her all at once. It is wonderful how a baby comes out of the most dreadful surroundings as a seedling comes out of the mud, so clean and fresh. I said this to Aunt Naomi yesterday, and she sniffed cynically.

"Yes," she answered, "but a weed grows into a weed, no matter how it looks when it is little."

The thought is dreadful to me. I will not believe that because a human being is born out of weakness and wickedness there is no chance for it. The difference, it seems to me, is that every human being has at least the germs of good as well as of bad, and one may be developed as well as the other. Baby must have much that is good and fine from her father, and the thing I have to do is to see to it that the best of her grows, and the worse part dies for want of nourishment. Surely we can do a great deal to aid nature. Perhaps my baby cannot help herself much, at least not for years and years; but if she is kept in an atmosphere which is completely wholesome, whatever is best in her nature must grow strong and crowd down everything less noble.