One evening Lem, starting for his sheep-pasture for his last look for the night, heard someone crying down by the river and then, as he paused to listen, heard it no more.  He jumped from the bridge without stopping to set down his lantern, knowing well the swiftness of the water, and caught the poor cowardly thing as she came, struggling and gasping, down with the current.  He took her home and gave her dry clothes of his mother’s.  Then leaving the scared and repentant child by his hearth, he set out on foot for the minister’s house and dragged him back over the rough country roads.

When Ma’am Warren awoke the next morning, Lem did not instantly answer her imperious call, as he had done for so many years.  Instead, a red-eyed girl in one of Mrs. Warren’s own nightgowns came to the door and said shrinkingly:  “Lem slept in the barn last night.  He give his bed to me; but he’ll be in soon.  I see him fussin’ around with the cow.”

Ma’am Warren stared, transfixed with a premonition of irremediable evil.  “What you doin’ here?” she demanded, her voice devoid of expression through stupefaction.

The girl held down her head.  “Lem and I were married last night,” she said.

Then Mrs. Warren found her voice.

When Lem came in it was to a scene of the furious wrangling which was henceforth to fill his house.

“... to saddle himself with such trash as you!” his mother was saying ragingly.

His wife answered in kind, her vanity stung beyond endurance.  “Well, you can be sure he’d never have got him a wife any other way!  Nobody but a girl hard put to it would take up with a drivel-headed fool like Lem Warren!”

And then the bridegroom appeared at the door and both women turned their attention to him.

When the baby was born, Lottie was very sick.  Lem took care of his mother, his wife, and the new baby for weeks and weeks.  It was at lambing-time, and his flock suffered from lack of attention, although as much as he dared he left his sick women and tended his ewes.  He ran in debt, too, to the grocery-stores, for he could work very little and earned almost nothing.  Of course the neighbors helped out, but it was no cheerful morning’s work to care for the vitriolic old woman, and Lottie was too sick for anyone but Lem to handle.  We did pass the baby around from house to house during the worst of his siege, to keep her off Lem’s hands; but when Lottie began to get better it was haying-time; everybody was more than busy, and the baby was sent back.

Lottie lingered in semi-invalidism for about a year and then died, Lem holding her hand in his.  She tried to say something to him that last night, so the neighbors who were there reported, but her breath failed her and she could only lie staring at him from eyes that seemed already to look from the other side of the grave.

He was heavily in debt when he was thus left with a year-old child not his own, but he gave Lottie a decent funeral and put up over her grave a stone stating that she was “Charlotte, loved wife of Lemuel Warren,” and that she died in the eighteenth year of her life.  He used to take the little girl and put flowers on the grave, I remember.