Willie, and always have, since the first time I saw him. Your mother
lay in her coffin, and Willie stood by her, caressing her cold cheek,
and saying, 'Wake up, mamma, it's Willie; don't you know Willie? I
took him in my arms, and vowed to love and shield him from the coming
evil; for I knew then, as well as I do now, that what has happened
would happen. Mag wasn't there; she didn't see me. If she had, she
might have liked me better; now she thinks there is no good in me; and
if, when you die, I should feel like shedding tears, and perhaps I
shall, it would be just like her to wonder 'what business _I_ had to
cry--it was none of my funeral!'"

"You do wrong to talk so, Lenora," said Carrie; "but tell me, did you
never have any one to love except Willie?"

"Yes," said Lenora; "when I was a child, a little, innocent child, I
had a grandmother--my father's mother--who taught me to pray, and told
me of God."

"Where is she now?" asked Carrie.

"In heaven," was the answer. "I know she is there, because when she
died there was the same look on her face that there was on your
mother's--the same that there will be on yours, when you are dead."

"Never mind," gasped Carrie, who did not care to be so frequently
reminded of her mortality, while Lenora continued:

"Perhaps you don't know that my father was, as mother says, a bad man;
though I always loved him dearly, and cried when he went away. We
lived with grandmother, and sometimes now, in my dreams, I am a child