nger:

"DEAR RUTH,--I know you will grieve for me when I tell you that our
baby went away from us quite suddenly this morning, while the
Easter bells were ringing so joyfully. They rang the knell of a
mother's heart, for they rang my baby's spirit into Paradise.

"I feel, through my tears, that it is better so, for she will bind
me closer to Heaven when I think that she, in her purity, awaits me
there.

"Hoping to see you very soon, I am
"Your loving FLOSSY.

"P.S.--Bronson seems to feel the baby's death to a truly
astonishing degree. F. H."

I flung the note across to Rachel, and, putting my head down on my two
arms, I cried just as hard as I could cry.

Rachel read it, then tore it into twenty bits, and ground her heel into
the fragments.

"Why, Rachel Percival! what is the matter?"

"She wasn't even at home. She was at church. She must have been. She told
me that Bronson was afraid to have her leave the baby, and wouldn't come
himself, but that she didn't think anything was the matter with it, and
wouldn't be tied down. Then such a note so soon afterwards! Ruth, what is
that woman made of?"

We went together to Flossy's. She came across the room to meet us,
supported by Bronson. She stumbled two or three times in the attempt.
Tears were running down Bronson's face, and he wiped them away quite
humbly, as if he did not mind our seeing them in the least. I could not
bear to watch him, so I slipped out of the room and went upstairs.

"In here, 'm," said the nurse; "and Miss Rachel is here too. She won't
move that far from the cradle, and she hasn't shed a tear."

Ruth lay peacefully in her little lace crib, covered with violets, and
beside her, rigid and white and tearless, stood Rachel. I was almost
afraid of the child as I looked at her. She turned her great eyes upon me
dumbly, with so exactly Bronson's expression in them that all at once I
understood her. I knelt down beside her, and gathering her little tense
frame all up in my arms, I began whispering to her. The tears rolled down
her cheeks, and soon she was crying hysterically. Bronson came bounding
upstairs at the sound, but she seized me more tightly around the neck and
held me chokingly. I motioned him back, and succeeded in carrying her away
to a quiet place, where I sat down with her in my arms, and made love to
her for hours.

I never heard a more