ok her head.

"No--no--Miss Alice," and then she smiled so brightly and cheerfully
that the little one in Alice Westmore's arms clapped her hands and
laughed: "Little mother--be up, well, to-morrow."

Little Mother turned her eyes on the child quickly, smiled and nodded
approval. But there were tears--tears which the little one did not
understand.

An hour went by--the wind had ceased, and with it the rain. The
children were asleep in bed; the father in his chair.

A cold sweat had broken out on the dying girl's forehead and she
breathed with a terrible effort. And in it all the two watchers
beside the bed saw that there was an agony there but not the fear of
death. She kept trying to bite her nails nervously and saying:

"There is only-- ... one thing-- ... one ... thing...."

"Tell me, Maggie," said the old man, bending low and soothing her
forehead with his hands, "tell us what's pesterin' you--maybe it
hadn't oughter be. You mustn't worry now--God'll make everything
right--to them that loves him even to the happy death. You'll die
happy an' be happy with him forever. The little 'uns an' the father,
you know they're fixed here--in this nice home an' the farm--so don't
worry."

"That's it!.... Oh, that's it!.... I got it that way-- ... all for
them ... but it's that that hurts now...."

He bent down over her: "Tell us, child--me an' Miss Alice--tell us
what's pesterin' you. You mustn't die this way--you who've got such a
right to be happy."

The hectic spark burned to white heat in her cheek. She bit her nails,
she picked at the cover, she looked toward the bed and asked feebly:
"Are they asleep? Can I talk to you two?"

The old man nodded. Alice soothed her brow.

Then she beckoned to the old preacher, who knelt by her side, and he
put his arms around her neck and raised her on the pillow. And his
ear was close to her lips, for she could scarcely talk, and Alice
Westmore knelt and listened, too. She listened, but with a griping,
strained heartache,--listened to a dying confession from the pale
lips, and the truth for the first time came to Alice Westmore, and
kneeling, she could not rise, but bent again her head and heard the
pitiful, dying confession. As she listened to the broken, gasping
words, heard the heart-breaking secret come out of the ruins of its
wrecked home, her love, her temptation, her ignorance in wondering if
she were really married by the laws of love, and then the great
martyrdom of