"Per-
haps," 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.
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