We came to a little cottage that stood by itself in a garden.
"Are you growing tired ?" she asked of her husband.
"I never tire with you," he replied.
"And you, Mr.Ford ?" she said.
She never overlooked or forgot me, but studied my comfort on every occasion.

I could have told her that I was watching what was to me a perfect problem--the kindly, gentle, pitying deeds of a woman, who had, I believed, murdered her own child.
"I am not tired, Mrs.Fleming, I am interested," I said.
The little cottage which stood in the midst of a wild patch of garden was inhabited by a day-laborer.

He was away at work; his wife sat at home nursing a little babe, a small, fair, tiny child, evidently not more than three weeks old, dying, too, if one could judge from the face.
She bent over it--the beautiful, graceful woman who was Lance's wife.
Ah, Heaven! the change that came over her, the passion of mother love that came into her face; she was transformed.
"Let me hold the little one for you," she said, "while you rest for a few minutes;" and the poor, young mother gratefully accepted the offer.
What a picture she made in the gloomy room of the little cottage, her beautiful face and shining hair, her dress sweeping the ground, and the tiny child lying in her arms.
"Does it suffer much ?" she asked, in her sweet, compassionate voice.
"It did, ma'am," replied the mother, "but I have given it something to keep it quiet." "Do you mean to say that you have drugged it ?" asked Mrs.Fleming.
"Only a little cordial, ma'am, nothing more; it keeps it sleeping; and when it sleeps it does not suffer." She shook her beautiful head.
"It is a bad practice," she said; "more babes are killed by drugs than die a natural death." I was determined she should look at me; I stepped forward and touched the child's face.
"Do you not think it is merciful at times to give a child like this drugs when it has to die; to lessen the pain of death--to keep it from crying out ?" Ah, me, that startled fear that leaped into her eyes, the sudden quiver on the beautiful face.
"I do not know," she said; "I do not understand such things." "What can it matter," I said, "whether a little child like this dies conscious or not?
It cannot pray--it must go straight to Heaven! Do you not think anyone who loved it, and had to see it die, would think it greatest kindness to drug it ?" My eyes held hers; I would not lose their glance; she could not take them away.

I saw the fear leap into them, then die away; she was saying to herself, what could I know?
But I knew.

I remembered what the doctor said in Brighton when the inquest was held on the tiny white body, "that it had been mercifully drugged before it was drowned." "I cannot tell," she replied, with a gentle shake of the head.