cottage in the portion of the village
devoted to white workingmen's homes, Kate allowed herself to be assisted
to the door, where she dismissed her daughter, telling her to return in
half an hour.

"I must see Mahaly alone," was her only answer to Jemima's uneasy
protests.

She was ushered respectfully into a neat, clean room, hung with the
enlarged crayon portraits dear to the colored race, and boasting a
parlor-organ draped in Battenberg lace. The window was open--a rare
thing in a negro home, despite her efforts with the Civic League. The
bed was stiffly starched and unoccupied, and the woman she had come to
see sat upright in a chair, propped with pillows, panting with the
effort of keeping breath in her lungs. She was dying of heart-disease.

She had been in her day rather a handsome creature, with the straight
hair and high features that indicate a not unusual admixture of Indian
blood. But though she must have been of about the same age as Mrs.
Kildare, she looked by comparison withered and superannuated, with the
grayish film across her eyes that one sees in those of aged animals.

These blurred eyes stared at Kate with a queer hostility, mixed with
something else; as they had stared on the day she came a bride to Storm.
She made a slight, futile attempt to rise.

"Nonsense, Mahaly! Don't move," said the Madam, kindly. "This is no time
for manners."

She closed the door behind her, and would have closed the window had it
not been for the woman's need of air and the inevitable faint odor that
clings about negro habitations, no matter how cleanly they are kept.
What she and her old servant had to say to each other must not be
overheard. Fancying that she detected sounds as of some one moving on
the porch outside, she called briefly: "Keep out of ear-shot, please."
She was too accustomed to obedience to investigate results.

"You wanted to see me, Mahaly?" she said. "You wanted to explain
something to me, perhaps?"

The woman struggled with her laboring breath. She was very near the end.
Kate found it painful to look at her, and her gaze wandered away to the
crayon portraits on the wall. The one over the bed, in the place of
honor, was a portrait of her husband, Basil Kildare. Her face hardened.
This was an impertinence! And yet....

Mahaly was speaking. "You-all ain't--found the French doctor yet--is
you?"

"No. We will not discuss that, if you please.... Mahaly, we may never
see each other again, yo