letter he sent me just before
leaving with Harrie for the West, but he did not come to see me
before he left.

When I try to sleep the words of Etta's note pass before me like
frightened children, crying--crying, and then again these children
sing a dreary chant, and still again the chant becomes a chorus which
repeats itself until I am unnerved; and they seem to be calling me,
these little children, and begging me to help make clean and safe the
paths that they must tread. I am just one woman. What can I do?

I knew Etta was dead before Selwyn received her note. Mrs. Banch,
the woman who kept the child for her, came running to Mrs. Mundy the
day after Etta had been to see me, and incoherently, sobbingly, with
hands twisting under her apron, she told us of finding Etta, with the
baby in her arms, lying on her bed, as she thought, asleep. But she
was not asleep. She was dead.

"She had done it as deliberate as getting ready to go on a long
journey," the woman had sobbed. "Everything was fixed and in its
place, and after bathing and dressing the baby in a clean gown, she
wrote on a piece of paper that all of its clothes were for my little
girl, and that she wouldn't do what she was doing if there was any
other way."

With a fresh outburst of tears, the woman handed me a half-sheet of
note-paper. "Bury us as we are," it read. "I am taking the baby
with me.--Etta."

"We will come with you." Mrs. Mundy, who had gotten out her hat and
coat to go to see Etta before Mrs. Banch came in, hurriedly put them
on, while I went for mine, and together we followed the woman to the
small and shabby house in the upper part of which Etta had been
living for some weeks past; the lower part being occupied by an old
shoemaker and his wife who had been kind to her; and as we entered
the room where the little mother and her baby lay I did not try to
keep them back--the tears that were too late.

"Last night I was standing in the door when she came by with a letter
in her hand." As Mrs. Banch talked, she was still quivering from the
shock of her discovery, and her words came brokenly. "On her way
back from mailing it I asked her to come in and set with me, but she
wouldn't do it; she said she was going to take the baby with her to
spend the night, as she didn't want to be by herself; and, going
up-stairs, she wrapped her up good and took her away with her. I
don't know why, but I felt worried all last night, and this morning