it is, I show the wear and tear of my harrowing experiences. I
have turned very gray--Liddy reminded me of it, only yesterday,
by saying that a little bluing in the rinse-water would make my
hair silvery, instead of a yellowish white. I hate to be
reminded of unpleasant things and I snapped her off.

"No," I said sharply, "I'm not going to use bluing at my time of
life, or starch, either."

Liddy's nerves are gone, she says, since that awful summer, but
she has enough left, goodness knows! And when she begins to go
around with a lump in her throat, all I have to do is to threaten
to return to Sunnyside, and she is frightened into a semblance of
cheerfulness,--from which you may judge that the summer there was
anything but a success.

The newspaper accounts have been so garbled and incomplete--one
of them mentioned me but once, and then only as the tenant at the
time the thing happened--that I feel it my due to tell what I
know. Mr. Jamieson, the detective, said himself he could never
have done without me, although he gave me little enough credit,
in print.

I shall have to go back several years--thirteen, to be exact--to
start my story. At that time my brother died, leaving me his two
children. Halsey was eleven then, and Gertrude was seven. All
the responsibilities of maternity were thrust upon me suddenly;
to perfect the profession of motherhood requires precisely as
many years as the child has lived, like the man who started to
carry the calf and ended by walking along with the bull on his