“Why, Charley! how could you know?” with wide eyes.

“So many things I know!  Oh, Charley’s wise!  To-morrow, Bud will go see new friends,—­such kind friends!  Charley knows.  A baby, Ben.  My boy will like that:  he’s a big giant beside that baby. Ben can hold it, and touch it, and kiss it.”

She looked at his pure hands with hungry eyes.

“Go on.  What else but the baby?”

“Kind friends for Ben, better and kinder than Charley.”

“That’s not true.  Where are you going, Charley?  I hate the kind friends.  I’ll stay with you,”—­beginning to cry.

Her eyes sparkled, and she laughed childishly.

“Only a little way, Bud, I’m going.  You watch for me,—­all the time you watch for me.  Some day you and I’ll go out to the country, and be good children together.”

What dawning of a new hope was this?  She did not feel as if she lied.  Some day,—­it might be true.  Yet the vague gleam died out of her heart, and when Ben, in his white night-gown, knelt down to say the prayer his mother had taught him, it was “Devil Lot’s” dead, crime-marked face that bent over him.

“God bless Charley!” he said.

She heard that.  She put him into the bed, then quietly bathed herself, filled his stocking with the candies she had bought, and lay down beside him,—­her limbs growing weaker, but her brain more lifeful, vivid, intent.

“Not long now,” she thought.  “Love me, Benny.  Kiss me good-night.”

The child put his arms about her neck, and kissed her forehead.

“Charley’s cold,” he said.  “When we are good children together, let’s live in a tent.  Will you, Sis?  Let’s make a tent now.”

“Yes, dear.”

She struggled up, and pinned the sheet over him to the head-board; it was a favorite fancy of Ben’s.

“That’s a good Charley,” sleepily.  “Good night.  I’ll watch for you all the time, all the time.”

He was asleep,—­did not waken even when she strained him to her heart, passionately, with a wild cry.

“Good bye, Benny.”  Then she lay quiet.  “We might have been good children together, if only——­I don’t know whose fault it is,” throwing her thin arms out desperately.  “I wish—­oh, I do wish somebody had been kind to me!”

Then the arms fell powerless, and Charley never moved again.  But her soul was clear.  In the slow tides of that night, it lived back, hour by hour, the life gone before.  There was a skylight above her; she looked up into the great silent darkness between earth and heaven,—­Devil Lot, whose soul must go out into that darkness alone.  She said that.  The world that had held her under its foul heel did not loathe her as she loathed herself that night. Lot.