ou, though
we 're all in trouble. Set right down, Nuss, do. Oh, it's dreadful
times!"

A handkerchief which was in readiness for any emotional overflow was
here called on for its function.

Nurse Byloe let herself drop into a flaccid squab chair with one of
those soft cushions, filled with slippery feathers, which feel so
fearfully like a very young infant, or a nest of little kittens, as they
flatten under the subsiding person.

The woman in the rocking-chair was Miss Cynthia Badlam, second-cousin
of Miss Silence Withers, with whom she had been living as a companion at
intervals for some years. She appeared to be thirty-five years old, more
or less, and looked not badly for that stage of youth, though of course
she might have been handsomer at twenty, as is often the case with
women. She wore a not unbecoming cap; frequent headaches had thinned her
locks somewhat of late years. Features a little too sharp, a keen, gray
eye, a quick and restless glance, which rather avoided being met, gave
the impression that she was a wide-awake, cautious, suspicious, and,
very possibly, crafty person.

"I could n't help comin'," said Nurse Byloe, "we do so love our
babies,--how can we help it, Miss Badlam?"

The spinster colored up at the nurse's odd way of using the possessive
pronoun, and dropped her eyes, as was natural on hearing such a speech.

"I never tended children as you have, Nuss," she said. "But I 've known
Myrtle Hazard ever since she was three years old, and to think she
should have come to such an end,--'The heart is deceitful above all
things and desperately wicked,'"--and she wept.

"Why, Cynthy Badlam, what do y' mean?" said Nurse Byloe. "Y' don't think
anything dreadful has come o' that child's wild nater, do ye?"

"Child!" said Cynthia Badlam,--"child enough to wear this very gown I
have got on and not find it too big for her neither." [It would have
pinched Myrtle here and there pretty shrewdly.]

The two women looked each other in the eyes with subtle interchange of
intelligence, such as belongs to their sex in virtue of its specialty.
Talk without words is half their conversation, just as it is all the
conversation of the lower animals. Only the dull senses of men are dead
to it as to the music of the spheres.

Their minds travelled along, as if they had been yoked together, through
whole fields of suggestive speculation, until the dumb growths
of thought ripened in both their souls into articulate