A murmur fell from the lips of the dying woman, while she rolled her head slowly from side to side, as if she were seeking ease less from physical pain than from the thought in her mind.  Her thick black hair, matted and damp where it had been brushed back from her forehead, spread like a veil over the pillow; and this sombre background lent a graven majesty to her features.  At the moment her head appeared as expressionless as a mask; but in a few minutes, while they waited for returning consciousness, a change passed slowly over the waxen face, and the full colourless lips began to move rapidly and to form broken and disconnected sentences.  For a time they could not understand; then the words came in a long sobbing breath.  “It has been too long.  It has been too long.”

“That goes on all the time,” said the old woman.  “I’ve been up with her for three nights, and she rambles almost every minute.  But sick folks are like that,” she concluded philosophically.  She had not laid down her knitting for an instant; and standing now beside the bed, she jerked the gray yarn automatically through her twisted fingers.  The clicking of the long wooden needles formed an accompaniment to the dry, hard sound of her words.

“Why doesn’t some one hush that child?” asked Corinna impatiently.  Through the open window a breeze entered, bringing the thin restless wail of the baby.

“The mother tries, but she can’t do anything.  She thinks the milk went wrong and gave it colic.”

The woman on the bed spoke suddenly in a clear voice.  “Why doesn’t he come?” she demanded.  Raising her heavy lids she looked straight into Corinna’s eyes, with a lucid and comprehending expression, as if she had just awakened from sleep.

Holding her knitting away from the bed with one hand, and bending over, until her deformed shape made a hill against the bedpost, the old woman screamed into the ear on the pillow, as if the hearer were either deaf or at a great distance.  Though her manner was not heartless, it was as impassive as philosophy.

“He is coming,” she shrieked.

“Is he bringing the child?”

“She is already here.  Can’t you see her there at the foot of the bed?”

The large black eyes, drained of any human expression, turned slowly toward the figure of Patty.

“But she is a little thing,” said the woman doubtfully.  “She is not three years old yet.  What has he done with her?  He told me that he would take care of her as if she belonged to him.”

The old hunchback, bending her inscrutable face, screamed again into the ear on the pillow.

“That was near sixteen years ago, Maggie,” she said.  “Have you forgotten?”

The woman closed her eyes wearily.  “Yes, I had forgotten,” she answered.  “Time goes so.”