The Withers Homestead was naturally the chief centre of interest.  Nurse Byloe, an ancient and voluminous woman, who had known the girl when she was a little bright-eyed child, handed over “the baby” she was holding to another attendant, and got on her things to go straight up to The Poplars.  She had been holding “the baby” these forty years and more, but somehow it never got to be more than a month or six weeks old.  She reached The Poplars after much toil and travail.  Mistress Fagan, Irish, house-servant, opened the door, at which Nurse Byloe knocked softly, as she was in the habit of doing at the doors of those who sent for her.

“Have you heerd anything yet, Kitty Fagan?” asked Nurse Byloe.

“Niver a blissed word,” said she.  “Miss Withers is upstairs with Miss Bathsheby, a cryin’ and a lamentin’.  Miss Badlam’s in the parlor.  The men has been draggin’ the pond.  They have n’t found not one thing, but only jest two, and that was the old coffeepot and the gray cat,—­it’s them nigger boys hanged her with a string they tied round her neck and then drownded her.” [P.  Fagan, Jr., Aet. 14, had a snarl of similar string in his pocket.]

Mistress Fagan opened the door of the best parlor.  A woman was sitting there alone, rocking back and forward, and fanning herself with the blackest of black fans.

“Nuss Byloe, is that you?  Well, to be sure, I’m glad to see you, though we ’re all in trouble.  Set right down, Nuss, do.  Oh, it’s dreadful times!”

A handkerchief which was in readiness for any emotional overflow was here called on for its function.

Nurse Byloe let herself drop into a flaccid squab chair with one of those soft cushions, filled with slippery feathers, which feel so fearfully like a very young infant, or a nest of little kittens, as they flatten under the subsiding person.

The woman in the rocking-chair was Miss Cynthia Badlam, second-cousin of Miss Silence Withers, with whom she had been living as a companion at intervals for some years.  She appeared to be thirty-five years old, more or less, and looked not badly for that stage of youth, though of course she might have been handsomer at twenty, as is often the case with women.  She wore a not unbecoming cap; frequent headaches had thinned her locks somewhat of late years.  Features a little too sharp, a keen, gray eye, a quick and restless glance, which rather avoided being met, gave the impression that she was a wide-awake, cautious, suspicious, and, very possibly, crafty person.

“I could n’t help comin’,” said Nurse Byloe, “we do so love our babies,—­how can we help it, Miss Badlam?”

The spinster colored up at the nurse’s odd way of using the possessive pronoun, and dropped her eyes, as was natural on hearing such a speech.

“I never tended children as you have, Nuss,” she said.  “But I ’ve known Myrtle Hazard ever since she was three years old, and to think she should have come to such an end,—­’The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked,’”—­and she wept.