afraid of anything, they don’t want to live in houses where such dreadful things have happened that you keep thinking about them.  I know after they told me I should never have stayed there another night, if I hadn’t thought so much of them, no matter how comfortable I was made; and I never was nervous, either.  But I stayed.  Of course, it didn’t happen in my room.  If it had I could not have stayed.”

“What was it?” asked Mrs. Emerson in an awed voice.

“It was an awful thing.  That child had lived in the house with her father and mother two years before.  They had come—­or the father had—­from a real good family.  He had a good situation:  he was a drummer for a big leather house in the city, and they lived real pretty, with plenty to do with.  But the mother was a real wicked woman.  She was as handsome as a picture, and they said she came from good sort of people enough in Boston, but she was bad clean through, though she was real pretty spoken and most everybody liked her.  She used to dress out and make a great show, and she never seemed to take much interest in the child, and folks began to say she wasn’t treated right.

“The woman had a hard time keeping a girl.  For some reason one wouldn’t stay.  They would leave and then talk about her awfully, telling all kinds of things.  People didn’t believe it at first; then they began to.  They said that the woman made that little thing, though she wasn’t much over five years old, and small and babyish for her age, do most of the work, what there was done; they said the house used to look like a pig-sty when she didn’t have help.  They said the little thing used to stand on a chair and wash dishes, and they’d seen her carrying in sticks of wood most as big as she was many a time, and they’d heard her mother scolding her.  The woman was a fine singer, and had a voice like a screech-owl when she scolded.

“The father was away most of the time, and when that happened he had been away out West for some weeks.  There had been a married man hanging about the mother for some time, and folks had talked some; but they weren’t sure there was anything wrong, and he was a man very high up, with money, so they kept pretty still for fear he would hear of it and make trouble for them, and of course nobody was sure, though folks did say afterward that the father of the child had ought to have been told.

“But that was very easy to say; it wouldn’t have been so easy to find anybody who would have been willing to tell him such a thing as that, especially when they weren’t any too sure.  He set his eyes by his wife, too.  They said all he seemed to think of was to earn money to buy things to deck her out in.  And he about worshiped the child, too.  They said he was a real nice man.  The men that are treated so bad mostly are real nice men.  I’ve always noticed that.