"Do I know of any reason for the child to run away ?" shrieked Eva, in a voice shrilly hideous with emotion, now and then breaking into hoarseness with the strain of tears.

"I guess I know why, I guess I do, and I wish I had been six foot under ground before I did what I did.

It was all my fault, every bit of it.

When I got home, and found that Fan had been making that precious young one a dress out of my old blue one, I pitched into her for it, and she gave it back to me, and then we jawed, and kept it up, till Andrew, he grabbed the dress and flung it into the fire, and did just right, too, and took Ellen and run over to old lady Brewster's with her; then Ellen, she see him cryin', and it scared her 'most to death, poor little thing, and she heard him say that if it wasn't for her he'd quit, and then she come runnin' home to her mother and me, and her mother said the same thing, and then that poor young one, she thought she wa'n't wanted nowheres, and she run.

She always was as easy to hurt as a baby robin; it didn't take nothing to set her all of a flutter and a twitter; and now she's just flown out of the nest.