charitably disposed among the citizens visited her, bringing comforts
and delicacies for her and presents for the pretty, innocent babes who
all unconscious of the cloud that hung over them, played happily upon
the floor of the dark and bare room in which their mother's life was
burning out. Nurse Betty, an ample, motherly soul, with cheeks like
winter apples and eyes like blue china, and a huge ruffled cap hiding
her straggly grey locks from view--versatile Betty, who was not only
nurse for the children and lady's maid for the star, but upon occasion
appeared in small parts herself, hovered about the bed and ministered to
her dying mistress.

As the hours and days dragged by the patient grew steadily weaker and
weaker. She seldom spoke, but lay quite silent and still save when
shaken by the torturing cough. On a Sunday morning early in December she
lay thus motionless, but wide-eyed, listening to the sounds of the
church-bells that broke the quiet air. As the voice of the last bell
died away she stirred and requested, in faint accents, that a packet
from the bottom of her trunk be brought to her. When this was done she
asked for the children, and when Nurse Betty brought them to the bedside
she gave into the hands of the wondering boy a miniature of herself,
upon the back of which was written: "For my dear little son Edgar, from
his mother," and a small bundle of letters tied with blue ribbon. She
clasped the baby fingers of the girl about an enameled jewel-case, of
artistic workmanship, but empty, for its contents had, alas, gone to pay
for food. She then motioned that the little ones be raised up and
allowed to kiss her, after which, a frail, white hand fluttered to the
sunny head of each, as she murmured a few words of blessing, then with a
gentle sigh, closed her eyes in her last, long sleep.

The baby girl began to whimper with fright at the suddenness with which
she was snatched up and borne from the room, and the boy looked with awe
into the face of the weeping nurse who, holding his sister in one arm
dragged him away from the bedside and out of the door, by the hand.
There was much hurried tramping to and fro, opening and closing of doors
and drawing to of window-blinds. These unusual sounds filled the boy
with a vague fear.

That night the children were put to bed upon a pallet in Mrs. Fipps' own
room and Mrs. Fipps herself rocked the baby Rosalie to sleep and gave
the little Edgar tea-cakes, in addition to