acant house, a smaller voice singing on the floor
above. This, as she remembered, was only an open attic that had been
used as a storeroom. With a half-guilty consciousness, she crept softly
up stairs, and, pushing the door partly open, looked within.

Athwart the long, low-studded attic, a slant sunbeam from a single small
window lay, filled with dancing motes, and only half illuminating the
barren, dreary apartment. In the ray of this sunbeam she saw the child's
glowing hair, as if crowned by a red aureola, as she sat upon the floor
with her exaggerated doll between her knees. She appeared to be talking
to it; and it was not long before Mrs. Tretherick observed that she was
rehearsing the interview of a half-hour before. She catechised the
doll severely, cross-examining it in regard to the duration of its
stay there, and generally on the measure of time. The imitation of Mrs.
Tretherick's manner was exceedingly successful, and the conversation
almost a literal reproduction, with a single exception. After she had
informed the doll that she was not her mother, at the close of the
interview she added pathetically, "that if she was dood, very dood, she
might be her mamma, and love her very much."

I have already hinted that Mrs. Tretherick was deficient in a sense of
humor. Perhaps it was for this reason that this whole scene affected
her most unpleasantly; and the conclusion sent the blood tingling to her
cheek. There was something, too, inconceivably lonely in the situation.
The unfurnished vacant room, the half-lights, the monstrous doll, whose
very size seemed to give a pathetic significance to its speechlessness,
the smallness of the one animate, self-centred figure,--all these
touched more or less deeply the half-poetic sensibilities of the woman.
She could not help utilizing the impression as she stood there, and
thought what a fine poem might be constructed from this material, if the
room were a little darker, the child lonelier,--say, sitting beside a
dead mother's bier, and the wind wailing in the turrets. And then she
suddenly heard footsteps at the door below, and recognized the tread of
the colonel's cane.

She flew swiftly down the stairs, and encountered the colonel in the
hall. Here she poured into his astonished ear a voluble and exaggerated
statement of her discovery, and indignant recital of her wrongs. "Don't
tell me the whole thing wasn't arranged beforehand; for I know it was!"
she almost screamed.