Wearily she leaned back on her pillows, and turned her face to the wall.  Mrs. Singleton drew the blankets over her, folded her own shawl about the shoulders, and smoothing away the hair, kissed her on the temple; then stole into the adjoining room, where her children slept.

Before the fire that leaped and crackled in the wide chimney, and leaning forward to rest her turbaned head against the mantelpiece, while she spread her hands toward the blaze, stood a much muffled figure.

“Dyce!”

Mrs. Singleton had left the door ajar, and the old woman turned and pointed to it, laying one finger on her lips; but the warning came too late.

“Hush!  I don’t want her to know I am here.  Your husband told me she was sitting up, and in her right mind, but too weak to stand any more trouble.  I wish I could run away, and never see her again, for when I go in there, I feel like I was carrying a knife to cut the heart out of a fawn, what the hounds had barely left life in.  I can’t bear the thought of having to tell her—­”

Dyce covered her face with her shawl, to stifle her sobs, and her large frame shook.  Mrs. Singleton whispered: 

“Tell me quick.  What is it.”

“Miss Ellie is dead.  I got there three days after she was buried.”

The warden’s wife sank into a chair, and drew the weeping negro into one beside her.

“Do you know exactly what time she died?”

“Yes—­I had it all put down in black and white.  She died on Tuesday night, just as the clock struck two; and the hospital nurse says—­ Lord, amercy, Miss Susan! are you going to faint?  You have turned ashy!”

As Mrs. Singleton’s thoughts recurred to the fact that it was at that hour that Beryl lay in the stupor of the crisis, from which she awoke perfectly conscious, and recalled the dream that the sick girl held as a vision, she felt a vague but bewildering dread seize her faculties, in defiance of cool reason, and scoffing scepticism.

“Go on, Dyce.  I felt a little sick.  Tell me—­”

She paused and listened to an unusual and inexplicable noise issuing from the next room; the harsh sound of something scraping the bare floor.

“You must pick your time to break this misery to that poor young thing.  I can’t do it.  I would run a mile sooner than face her with the news, that her ma is dead; and I have grieved and cried, till I feel like my brains had been put in a pot and biled.  The Lord knows His bizness, of course; yes, of course He knows the best to do; but ’pears to me, His mercy hid its face behind His wrath, when He saw fit to let that poor innercent young creetur in there get well, after her ma was laid in the grave.  It will be a harder heart than mine what can stand by, and tell her she is motherless.”

“There is no need to tell her.  She knows it.”

“How?  Did she get the letter the Doctor said he wrote?”

“No.  She thinks her mother—­”