o that I couldn't see
her eyes. But they was the beginnings of a smile onto her face. It was
both soft and sad.

"Well," says Colonel Tom, "you two have wasted almost twenty years of
life."

"There is one good thing," says the doctor. "It is a good thing that
there was no child to suffer by our mistakes."

She raised her face when he said that, Miss Lucy did, and looked in his
direction.

"You call that a good thing?" she says, in a kind of wonder. And after
a minute she sighs. "Perhaps," she says, "you are right. Heaven only
knows. Perhaps it WAS better that he died."

"DIED!" sings out the doctor.

And I hearn his chair scrape back, like he had riz to his feet sudden.
I nearly busted my neck trying fur to see him, but I couldn't. I was all
twisted up, head down, and the blood getting into my head from it so I
had to pull it out every little while.

"Yes," she says, with her eyes wide, "didn't you know he died?" And then
she turns quick toward Colonel Tom. "Didn't you tell him--" she begins.
But the doctor cuts in.

"Lucy," he says, his voice shaking and croaking in his throat, "I never
knew there was a child!"

I hears Colonel Tom hawk in HIS throat like a man who is either going
to spit or else say something. But he don't do either one. No one says
anything fur a minute. And then Miss Lucy says agin:

"Yes--he died."

And then she fell into a kind of a muse. I have been myself in the fix
she looked to be in then--so you forget fur a while where you are, or
who is there, whilst you think about something that has been in the back
part of your mind fur a long, long time.

What she was musing about was that child that hadn't lived. I could tell
that by her face. I could tell how she must have thought of it, often
and often, fur years and years, and longed fur it, so that it seemed to
her at times she could almost touch it. And how good a mother she would
of been to it. Some women has jest natcherally GOT to mother something
or other. Miss Lucy was one of that kind. I knowed all in a flash,
whilst I looked at her there, why she had adopted Martha fur her child.

It was a wonderful look that was onto her face. And it was a wonderful
face that look was onto. I felt like I had knowed her forever when I
seen her there. Like the thoughts of her the doctor had been carrying
around with him fur years and years, and that I had caught him thinking
oncet or twicet, had been my thoughts too, all my life.

Miss Luc