Her hand had let go its grasp of her mother’s shoulder and hung listlessly down by her side, her eyes seemed fixed on vacancy, though in reality they were seeing that little blue-eyed baby up in some square room in Dorset Street, surrounded with wretchedness and poverty, while she, the mother, was rolling in wealth, with luxury and elegance everywhere. Truly it was a terrible picture to contemplate, but not so terrible as the second one presented to her mind, the picture of a young girl grown to womanhood, as that blue-eyed baby must be, and sunk, perhaps to the lowest depths of misery and possible shame, for who was there to teach her, to keep her feet from straying when the mother had abandoned her? It was this which affected Edith the most, and froze her almost to catalepsy during the moment she stood without the power to speak or stir, her head bent forward, her hands hanging down, her eyes fixed and glassy, and a white froth oozing from her lips, which moved at last, and said, slowly, painfully: “_May Heaven forgive you, mother, for I never can!_” Another moment and Edith fell heavily across the foot of the bed, while Mrs. Barrett’s loud shriek roused Gertie from sleep and brought her to the room. “It’s a fit,—she is dying,—she is dead,” Mrs. Barrett murmured, pointing to Edith, who for hours lay in a stupor which seemed like death, and from which nothing had power to rouse her. Gertie had summoned help at once, and the colonel was the first in the room, and held his fainting wife in his arms, and felt a mortal fear steal over him when he saw the deadly paleness and the foam about the lips, the purple rings beneath the eyes, and the head drooping so heavily on his shoulder. It was overtasking her strength, and sitting up so much with her mother, he thought, and the doctor thought so too, and when before the sunsetting they buried in the cemetery the little daughter whose eyes never opened in this world, and whom Edith never saw, they were sure it was over-exertion at a time when she needed all her strength, and the colonel’s affection for his mother-in-law was _not_ perceptibly increased. _She_ had offered no explanation whatever with regard to the fit, except that it came suddenly, when Edith was standing by her. Indeed she was nearly distracted herself, and Gertie, who watched by her, would not have been surprised to see her life go out at any moment. For some reason there seemed to be a strong prejudice in the house against the woman. Nobody wanted to wait on her, nobody wanted to go near her, and so Gertie became her sole nurse, though she wished so much to be with Mrs. Schuyler, who was raving in the room across the hall, and whom it sometimes took two men to hold. But Gertie’s duty was plain, and she stayed with the poor old woman, who clung to her like a child, talking strange things at times, and asking questions hard for Gertie to answer. “Would God forgive her sin? Was there yet hope for her?”