“Mother, I do wish—­” she began; but Fanny cut her short.

“She’s pretendin’ she don’t like it,” she said, almost hilariously, her face glowing with triumph, “but she does.  You ought to have seen her when she came in last night.”

“I guess I know who it was,” said Eva, but she echoed her sister’s manner half-heartedly.  She was looking very badly that morning, her face was stained, and her eye hard with a look as if tears had frozen in them.  She had come in a soiled waist, too, without any collar.

“For Heaven’s sake, Eva Tenny, what ails you?” Fanny cried.

Eva flung herself for answer on the floor, and fairly writhed.  Words were not enough expression for her violent temperament.  She had to resort to physical manifestations or lose her reason.  As she writhed, she groaned as one might do who was dying in extremity of pain.

Ellen, when she heard her aunt’s groans, stopped, and stood in the entry viewing it all.  She thought at first that her aunt was ill, and was just about to call out to know if she should go for the doctor, all her grievances being forgotten in this evidently worse stress, when her mother fairly screamed again, stooping over her sister, and trying to raise her.

“Eva Tenny, you tell me this minute what the matter is.”

Then Eva raised herself on one elbow, and disclosed a face distorted with wrath and woe, like a mask of tragedy.

“He’s gone! he’s gone!” she shrieked out, in an awful, shrill voice, which was like the note of an angry bird.  “He’s gone!”

“For God’s sake, not—­Jim?”

“Yes, he’s gone! he’s gone!  Oh, my God! my God! he’s gone!”

All at once the little Amabel appeared, slipping past Ellen silently.  She stood watching her mother.  She was vibrating from head to foot as if strung on wires.  She was not crying, but she kept catching her breath audibly; her little hands were twitching in the folds of her frock; she winked rapidly, her lids obscuring and revealing her eyes until they seemed a series of blue sparks.  She was no paler than usual—­that was scarcely possible—­but her skin looked transparent, pulses were evident all over her face and her little neck.

“You don’t mean he’s gone with—?” gasped Fanny.

Suddenly Eva raised herself with a convulsive jerk from the floor to her feet.  She stood quite still.  “Yes, he has gone,” she said, and all the passion was gone from her voice, which was much more terrible in its calm.

“You don’t mean with—?”

“Yes; he has gone with Aggie.”  Eva spoke in a voice like a deaf-mute’s, quite free from inflections.  There was something dreadful about her rigid attitude.  Little Amabel looked at her mother’s eyes, then cowered down and began to cry aloud.  Ellen came in and took her in her arms, whispering to her to soothe her.  She tried to coax her away, but the child resisted violently, though she was usually so docile with Ellen.