childbirth for a fourth time, and that apparently did not tend to raise
her spirits.

'I don't think I shall get over it this time!' she said one day.

'Pooh! what childish foreboding! Why shouldn't it be as well now as
ever?'

She shook her head. 'I feel almost sure I am going to die; and I should
be glad, if it were not for Nelly, and Frank, and Tiny.'

'And me!'

'You'll soon find somebody to fill my place,' she murmured, with a sad
smile. 'And you'll have a perfect right to; I assure you of that.'

'Ell, you are not thinking still about that--poetical friend of yours?'

She neither admitted nor denied the charge. 'I am not going to get over
my illness this time,' she reiterated. 'Something tells me I shan't.'

This view of things was rather a bad beginning, as it usually is; and, in
fact, six weeks later, in the month of May, she was lying in her room,
pulseless and bloodless, with hardly strength enough left to follow up
one feeble breath with another, the infant for whose unnecessary life she
was slowly parting with her own being fat and well. Just before her
death she spoke to Marchmill softly:-

'Will, I want to confess to you the entire circumstances of that--about
you know what--that time we visited Solentsea. I can't tell what