a cent, in failing health and with a
six-month-old girl baby. That was less than two years before we came to
this town. We lived then in a little town called Calais, on the Eastern
Shore of Maryland.

"Three months after the husband ran away the wife died. I guess it was
shame and a broken heart more than anything else that killed her. She
had not a soul in the world to whom she could turn for help when she was
dying. We two did what we could for her. We didn't have much--we never
have had much all through our lives--but what we had we divided with
her. We were literally the only friends she had in this world. At the
last we took turns nursing her, my husband and I did. When she was dying
she put her baby in my arms and asked me to take her and to care for
her. That was what I had been praying all along that she would do, and I
was glad and I gave her my promise and she lay back on the pillow and
died.

"Well, she was buried and we took the child and cared for her. We came
to love her as though she had been our own; we always loved her as
though she had been our own. Less than a year after the mother
died--that was when Ellie was about eighteen months old--we brought her
with us out here to this town. Her baptismal name was Eleanor, which had
been her mother's name--Eleanor Major. The father who ran away was named
Richard Major. We went on calling her Eleanor, but as our child she
became Eleanor Millsap. She has never suspected--she has never for one
moment dreamed that she was not our own. After she grew up and showed
indifference to us, and especially after she had married and began to
behave toward us in a way which has caused her, I expect, to be
criticized by some people, we still nursed that secret and it gave us
comfort. For we knew, both of us, that it was the alien blood in her
that made her turn her back upon us. We knew the reason, if no one else
did, for she was not our own flesh and blood. Our own could never have
served us so. And to-night I know better than ever before, and it
lessens my sense of disappointment and distress.

"Judge Priest, perhaps you will not understand me, but the mother
instinct is a curious thing. Through these last few years of my life I
have felt as though there were two women inside of me. One of these
women grieved because her child had denied her. The other of these women
was reconciled because she could see reflected in the actions of that
child the traits of a breed of str