brought tears to the impressionable girl's eyes, "don't go gossiping
about me downstairs. I sha'n't be sick long. I am going to be
better soon, very soon. By the time you see me here again I shall
be quite like my old self. Forget how - how" - and Loretta said she
seemed to have difficulty in finding the right word here - "how
childish I have been."

Of course Loretta promised, but she is not sure that she would have
had the courage to keep all this to herself if she had not heard
Mrs. Jeffrey stop in Miss Tuttle's room on her way out. That
relieved her, and enabled her to go downstairs to her own supper
with more appetite than she had thought ever to have again. Alas!
it was the last good meal she was able to eat for days. In three
hours afterward a man came from the station house with the news of
Mrs. Jeffrey's suicide in the horrible old house in which she had
been married only two weeks before.

As this had been a continuous narrative and concisely told, the
coroner had not interrupted her. When at this point a little gasp
escaped Miss Tuttle and a groan broke from Francis Jeffrey's
hitherto sealed lips, the feelings of the whole assemblage seemed
to find utterance. A young wife's misery culminating in death on
the very spot where she had been so lately married! What could be
more thrilling, or appeal more closely to the general heart of
humanity? But the cause of that misery! This was what every one
present was eager to have explained. This is what we now expected
the coroner to bring out. But instead of continuing on the line he
had opened up, he proceeded to ask:

"Where were you when this officer brought the news you mention?"