head to the fire again, and it was some seconds before she again
spoke, and then more rapidly--

"Well, you see I thought some of you must have known me. There's no
great harm done anyway. What I was going to say was this: Jim here"--
she took his hand in both of hers as she spoke--"used to know me, if
you didn't, and spent a heap of money upon me. I reckon he spent all
he had. And one day--it's six years ago this winter--Jim came into my
back room, sat down on my sofy, like as you see him in that chair, and
never moved again without help. He was struck all of a heap, and never
seemed to know what ailed him. The doctors came and said as how it was
caused all along of his way of life,--for Jim was mighty free and
wild-like,--and that he would never get better, and couldn't last long
anyway. They advised me to send him to Frisco to the hospital, for he
was no good to any one and would be a baby all his life. Perhaps it
was something in Jim's eye, perhaps it was that I never had a baby,
but I said 'No.' I was rich then, for I was popular with everybody,--
gentlemen like yourself, sir, came to see me,--and I sold out my
business and bought this yer place, because it was sort of out of the
way of travel, you see, and I brought my baby here."

With a woman's intuitive tact and poetry, she had, as she spoke,
slowly shifted her position so as to bring the mute figure of the
ruined man between her and her audience, hiding in the shadow behind
it, as if she offered it as a tacit apology for her actions. Silent
and expressionless, it yet spoke for her; helpless, crushed, and
smitten with the Divine thunderbolt, it still stretched an invisible
arm around her.

Hidden in the darkness, but still holding his hand, she went on:--