“Don’t call any one, please,” she said, when Gertie proposed going for Mrs. Tiffe. “I’d rather be alone with you, who have been so kind to me, and who, I am sure, like me a little.” “Yes,—I do, I do!” Gertie said, kissing the white face, on which the death-dew was standing. And Mrs. Barrett continued: “It is strange that you should be the one to care for me at the last, as tenderly as if you were my own grandchild. Have you a grandmother, Gertie?” “Yes, or I had one once, though I never saw her; but Auntie Rogers said so, and told me all I ever knew of my family, which is very little. Sometimes I have strange ideas, as if I belonged to nobody, and then I try so hard to recall what it was I once overheard auntie saying to her sister in London years ago. Miss Anne Stover was at our house——” “Stover! Stover!” Mrs. Barrett repeated, raising herself in bed and quivering in every nerve. “Yes, she was auntie’s sister, you know; and said something about somebody’s being identified by a _mark_, and there’s a mark on my bosom, low down——” “A mark of what?” Mrs. Barrett asked, eagerly. And Gertie replied: “It is like a drop of blood.” “Blood! Did you say a drop of blood?” and Mrs. Barrett shook as with an ague chill as she fell back upon her pillow, while Gertie bent over her, and bathed her brow and lips until, rallying all her energies, she said: “Gertie, Gertie! tell Edith,—tell her! Oh, if I could live to see her myself! Gertie, my child, God bless you! I know He has forgiven me now!” Her arms closed tightly around Gertie’s neck, and held her there in a close embrace until the girl herself unclasped them, and, putting them gently down upon the bed, saw that Mrs. Barrett was dead. And just across the hall in her own room Edith lay, now singing snatches of some lullaby to an unseen child, which she hushed in her arms, now talking of the rain upon the window-pane, the tramp upon the stairs, the roar in the streets, and again laughing deliriously at something she said, and which seemed to strike her as ridiculous. And by her Colonel Schuyler sat, with the fear of death in his heart, when Gertie came in and told him there was really death in the next room, and asked if he had any orders to give. “None,—no, do what you like,” he answered, quickly; then glancing at the white face on the pillow, and remembering that she who lay dead beneath his roof was his young wife’s mother, he rose and added: “I’ll go myself and see her;” and following Gertie, he soon stood by the motionless form of her who had been his mother-in-law, and whose presence in his house had annoyed him so much.