ght
anything was too good for that young one." Then she burst out with
a sob louder than her sister's. Eva had usually a coarsely
well-kempt appearance, her heavy black hair being securely twisted,
and her neck ribbons tied with smart jerks of neatness; but to-day
her hair was still in the fringy braids of yesterday, and her cotton
blouse humped untidily in the back. Her face was red and her lips
swollen; she looked like a very bacchante of sorrow, and as if she
had been on some mad orgy of grief.

Mr. Walsey, of _The Spy_, who had formerly conducted a paper in a
college town and was not accustomed to the feminine possibilities of
manufacturing localities, felt almost afraid of her. He had never
seen a woman of that sort, and thought vaguely of the French
Revolution and fish-wives when she gave vent to her distress over
the loss of the child. He fairly jumped when she cut short a
question of his with a volley of self-recriminatory truths,
accompanied with fierce gesturing. He stood back involuntarily out
of reach of those powerful, waving arms. "Do I know of any reason
for the child to run away?" shrieked Eva, in a voice shrilly hideous
with emotion, now and then breaking into hoarseness with the strain
of tears. "I guess I know why, I guess I do, and I wish I had been
six foot under ground before I did what I did. It was all my fault,
every bit of it. When I got home, and found that Fan had been making
that precious young one a dress out of my old blue one, I pitched
into her for it, and she gave it back to me, and then we jawed, and
kept it up, till Andrew, he grabbed the dress and flung it into the
fire, and did just right, too, and took Ellen and run over to old
lady Brewster's with her; then Ellen, she see him cryin', and it
scared her 'most to death, poor little thing, and she heard him say
that if it wasn't for her he'd quit, and then she come runnin' home
to her mother and me, and her mother said the same thing, and then
that poor young one, she thought she wa'n't wanted nowheres, and she
run. She always was as easy to hurt as a baby robin; it didn't take
nothing to set her all of a flutter and a twitter; and now she's
just flown out of the nest. Oh my God, I wish my tongue had been
torn out by the roots before I'd said a word about her blessed
little dress; I wish Fan had cut up every old rag I've got; I'd go
dressed in fig-leaves before I'd had it happen. Oh! oh! oh!"

Young Joe Bemis, of _The Star_, was t