But not, apparently, the same Miggles who a few hours before had flashed upon us.  Her eyes were downcast, and as she hesitated for a moment on the threshold, with a blanket on her arm, she seemed to have left behind her the frank fearlessness which had charmed us a moment before.  Coming into the room, she drew a low stool beside the paralytic’s chair, sat down, drew the blanket over her shoulders, and saying, “If it’s all the same to you, boys, as we’re rather crowded, I’ll stop here tonight,” took the invalid’s withered hand in her own, and turned her eyes upon the dying fire.  An instinctive feeling that this was only premonitory to more confidential relations, and perhaps some shame at our previous curiosity, kept us silent.  The rain still beat upon the roof, wandering gusts of wind stirred the embers into momentary brightness, until, in a lull of the elements, Miggles suddenly lifted up her head, and, throwing her hair over her shoulder, turned her face upon the group and asked: 

“Is there any of you that knows me?”

There was no reply.

“Think again!  I lived at Marysville in ’53.  Everybody knew me there, and everybody had the right to know me.  I kept the Polka saloon until I came to live with Jim.  That’s six years ago.  Perhaps I’ve changed some.”

The absence of recognition may have disconcerted her.  She turned her head to the fire again, and it was some seconds before she again spoke, and then more rapidly: 

“Well, you see I thought some of you must have known me.  There’s no great harm done, anyway.  What I was going to say was this:  Jim here”—­she took his hand in both of hers as she spoke—­“used to know me, if you didn’t, and spent a heap of money upon me.  I reckon he spent all he had.  And one day—­it’s six years ago this winter—­Jim came into my back room, sat down on my sofy, like as you see him in that chair, and never moved again without help.  He was struck all of a heap, and never seemed to know what ailed him.  The doctors came and said as how it was caused all along of his way of life—­for Jim was mighty free and wild-like—­and that he would never get better, and couldn’t last long anyway.  They advised me to send him to Frisco to the hospital, for he was no good to anyone and would be a baby all his life.  Perhaps it was something in Jim’s eye, perhaps it was that I never had a baby, but I said ‘No.’  I was rich then, for I was popular with everybody—­gentlemen like yourself, sir, came to see me—­and I sold out my business and bought this yer place, because it was sort of out of the way of travel, you see, and I brought my baby here.”

With a woman’s intuitive tact and poetry, she had, as she spoke, slowly shifted her position so as to bring the mute figure of the ruined man between her and her audience, hiding in the shadow behind it, as if she offered it as a tacit apology for her actions.  Silent and expressionless, it yet spoke for her; helpless, crushed, and smitten with the Divine thunderbolt, it still stretched an invisible arm around her.