's aching sense of loss. But
later, when we heard the sound of wheels and saw Captain Sartell and the
doctor driving very fast up the lane, I went down the stairs and passed
out before them. I could not bear to watch the strong man's face when he
should find his baby dead.

Little Bess was buried under the lilac blossoms. The fever which had so
soon smitten her down was not properly a contagious one. I went on with
my school again, missing the sweet face of the dead child more and more
each succeeding day.

Not one of the children with whom she had played was taken sick, but it
was scarcely two weeks after her death that I was taken sick as she had
been. In the interval George Olver had come to me and I had written to
Rebecca, but Rebecca had not come back to Wallencamp nor answered my
letter. I was more anxious and troubled about her than I dared confess to
any one. Then suddenly I ceased to care for any of those things. Of my
last afternoon in school I could recall very little afterwards, except
that the clock on the shelf back of me seemed to be ticking in my brain,
and the voices in the room sounded indistinct. My own voice sounded to me
like that of some one else speaking from a long way off.

And at evening, in the Ark, I put my little room in perfect order, my
head growing heavy with pain. I felt that I must finish this task before
I lay down, and there was another intention to which I clung with a
painful pertinacity of mind.

I sat down at my table and wrote half a dozen or more brief letters
home. These were filled with irrelevant anecdotes pertaining to my
experience among the Wallencampers, a few desultory descriptions of
character and scenery, with a philosophical digression or two.

To one not intimately acquainted with the epistolary products of my pen,
these letters would have undoubtedly suggested the workings of a crazed
and feverish brain, but they were not calculated to arouse any particular
alarm in the minds of my friends at home, unless, indeed, it was by
reason of the unusual care and painstaking evinced in their chirography
and the punctilious manner in which they were dated. The first one I
dated for the evening on which I was writing. The next for a time several
days in advance of that, and so on, performing this strange act with
utter indifference to the presumption of it.

When it was finished, I seemed to have forgotten what next to do. Grandma
Keeler told me afterwards, that I went t