The only reply that came was a gasping sound, which grew louder and louder, with the woman’s struggle for breath, until it seemed to fill the room and the night outside and even the desolate sky.  As she lay back, with the arm of the old cripple under her head and her streaming hair, the spasm passed like a stain over her face, changing its waxen pallor to the colour of ashes, while a dull purplish shadow encircled her mouth.  For a few minutes, so violent was the struggle for air, it appeared to Corinna that nothing except death could ever quiet that agonized gasping; but while she waited for the end, the sound became gradually fainter, and the woman spoke quite plainly, though with an effort that racked not only her strangled chest, but her entire body.  Each syllable came so slowly, and now and then so faintly, that there were moments when it seemed that the breath in that tormented body would not last until the words had been spoken.

“You were going on three years old when he first saw you.  They were taking me away to prison—­that’s over now, and it don’t matter—­but I hadn’t any chance—­” The panting began again; but by force of will, the woman controlled it after a minute, and went on, as if she were measuring her breath inch by inch, almost as if it were a material substance which she was holding in reserve for the end.  “Your father died the first year I married him, and things went from bad to worse—­there’s no use going over that, no use—­They were taking me to prison from the circus, and I had you in my arms, when Gideon Vetch came by and saw me—­” Again there was a pause and a desperate battle for air; and again, after it was over, she went on in that strangled whisper, while her eyes, like the eyes of a drowning animal, clung neither to Patty nor Corinna, but to the austere face of the old hunchback. “’What am I to do with the child?’ I asked, and he stepped right out of the circus crowd, and answered ’Give me the child.  I like children’—­” An inarticulate moan followed, and then she repeated clearly and slowly.  “Just like that—­nothing more—­’Give me the child.  I like children.’  That was the first time I ever saw him.  He had come to see some of the people in the circus, and I’ve never seen him since then except in the Square.  The trial went against me, but that’s all over.  Oh, I’m tired now.  It hurts me.  I can’t talk—­”

She broke into terrible coughing; and the old woman, dropping her knitting for the first time since they had entered the room, seized a towel from a chair by the bed.  “Talking was too much for her,” she said.  “I thought she’d pull through.  She was so much better—­but talking was too much.”

“She is so ill that she doesn’t know what she is saying,” murmured Corinna in the girl’s ear.  “She is out of her mind.”

“No, she isn’t out of her mind,” replied Patty quietly.  “She isn’t out of her mind.”  In her ball gown of green and silver, like the colours of sunlit foam, with a wreath of artificial leaves in her hair, her loveliness was unearthly.  “It is every bit true.  I know it,” she reiterated.