house during the worst of his siege, to keep her off Lem's hands; but
when Lottie began to get better it was haying-time; everybody was more
than busy, and the baby was sent back.

Lottie lingered in semi-invalidism for about a year and then died, Lem
holding her hand in his. She tried to say something to him that last
night, so the neighbors who were there reported, but her breath failed her
and she could only lie staring at him from eyes that seemed already to
look from the other side of the grave.

He was heavily in debt when he was thus left with a year-old child not his
own, but he gave Lottie a decent funeral and put up over her grave a stone
stating that she was "Charlotte, loved wife of Lemuel Warren," and that
she died in the eighteenth year of her life. He used to take the little
girl and put flowers on the grave, I remember.

Then he went to work again. His sandy hair was already streaked with gray,
though he was but thirty. The doctor said the reason for this phenomenon
was the great strain of his year of nursing; and indeed throughout that
period of his life no one knew when he slept, if ever. He was always up
and dressed when anyone else was, and late at night we could look across
and see his light still burning and know that he was rubbing Lottie's back
or feeding little Susie.

All that was changed now, of course. Susie was a strong, healthy child
who slept all through the night in her little crib by her stepfather's
corded bed, and in the daytime went everywhere he did. Wherever he "worked
out" he used to give her her nap wrapped in a horse blanket on the hay in
the barn; and he carried her in a sling of his own contrivance up to his
sheep-pasture. Old Ma'am Warren disliked the pretty, laughing child so
bitterly that he was loath to leave her at home; but when he was there
with her, for the first time he asserted himself against his mother,
bidding her, when she began to berate the child's parentage, to "be
still!" with so strange and unexpected an accent of authority that she was
quite frightened.

Susie was very fond of her stepfather at first, but when she came of
school age, mixed more with the other children, and heard laughing,
contemptuous remarks about him, the frank and devouring egotism of
childhood made her ashamed of her affection, ashamed of him with his
uncouth gait, his mouth always sagging open, his stammering, ignorant
speech, which the other children amused themselves by mocking.