It was six years ago; if it had lived, it would have been as old as Carry.

The arms which were folded loosely around the sleeping child began to tremble, and tighten their clasp.

And then the deep potential impulse came, and with a half-sob, half-sigh, she threw her arms out and drew the body of the sleeping child down, down, into her breast, down again and again as if she would hide it in the grave dug there years before.

And the gust that shook her passed, and then, ah me! the rain.
A drop or two fell upon the curls of Carry, and she moved uneasily in her sleep.

But the woman soothed her again--it was SO easy to do it now--and they sat there quiet and undisturbed, so quiet that they might have seemed incorporate of the lonely silent house, the slowly declining sunbeams, and the general air of desertion and abandonment, yet a desertion that had in it nothing of age, decay, or despair.
Colonel Starbottle waited at the Fiddletown Hotel all that night in vain.