“Read it, read it!” she cried. She was sitting bowed over, her elbows on her knees, her face hidden in her hands. He read, picking the words out with difficulty. “It commences, ‘Dear’--just that: she forgot to put the rest, I reckon. ‘Dear, I can’t stand no more. My niece, my baby--baby,’ (she’s got that twice over) ‘to see me to-day.’ (She’s left out something here) ‘trouble. She’s in awful trouble. Her husband’s left an’ gone with another woman. She’s all broke up by it. My baby she cried and cried.’” He paused. “Don’t leave out anything: read it all--_all_,” she breathed from behind her hands. He went on again: “‘An’ now the law’s lookin’ for him. My poor little baby child! All I had. I can’t stand up against this trouble--disgrace. People talk, always peeking and spying at you, an’ talk. I ain’t got no more to live for now, an’ I don’t want to live--’” He hesitated. “All, Tim, _all_!” she cried out again. “‘Don’t want to live if there’s bad people in the world like what took my baby’s husband. She was all I had to set my heart on. You understand. You been good--good to me.’ (She’s got ‘good’ written twice over, Julie.) ‘I take my pen in hand--these few lines. Don’t let any one be blamed. Nobody to blame but that woman. You been good to me. I thank you, an’ so no more at present from your poor old friend, Eliza Annie Fogg.’” He dropped the paper, and turned to her. “Julie! Honey!” he cried. “Julie, _don’t_ take it so hard! She was just a crazy old woman: anything would have made her do it!” Julie raised her ghastly face, staring at him. “She was my child,” she said, “and I’ve killed her. Oh, you don’t know; but she was like my own child. She was in the dark, an’ sufferin’. I had so much happiness--I thought it would give her life. Instead--” “Julie, she was crazy!” he pleaded. Her eyes, though she still stared at him, were remote, fixed upon an inward picture. “Tim,” she said. “It was all over the clean waist I pressed for her--all over it. I’ve killed her. And--and Elizabeth too, she was crying.” “Elizabeth! _Her_ tears--” he broke in violently, but she silenced him. “No, don’t speak now; don’t. Let me alone. I’ve got to be by myself and think it all out alone. I’ve got to think.” She rose unsteadily. She stood looking at him one moment more, dumbly, uncertainly, groping perhaps to find something for his consolation, but she found nothing, and in the end she evaded his outstretched arms, murmured blindly, “I got to be alone--I got to think it all out,” and passed from the kitchen and through to the dark of the sitting-room, where she shut the door fast behind her.