“Then why has He branded me here in my head, where it keeps thump, thump! just like the beating of a drum, and where it is so hot and snarled?” Laura asked. Then, before Magdalen could reply, she continued: “I did not mean to kill it, and I don’t think I did. I put it somewhere, or gave it to somebody; but the more I try to think, the more it thumps, and thumps, and I can’t make it out; only I didn’t; didn’t truly mean to kill it. Oh, baby! No, no! I didn’t! I didn’t!” She was sobbing in a pitiful kind of way, and Magdalen moved her position so that she could take the poor, tired, “twisted” head upon her bosom, while she soothed and comforted the moaning woman, softly smoothing her tangled hair and asking her, at last, if she would not like it brushed and put up out of her way. “It will look nicer so,” she said; and, as Laura made no objection, she brought the brush and comb from a little basket on the bureau, and then set herself to the task of combing out the matted hair, which had been sorely neglected since Alice went away. “Allie will be glad to know I am so nice. She likes me neat and tidy, but a woman with a child to tend cannot always keep herself as she would,” Laura said, when the hair-dressing was ended and Magdalen had buttoned her night-dress, and thrown around her a crimson shawl which hung across the bed. The woman herself was rocking the cradle now, and signaling Magdalen to be quiet, for baby was waking up. To her there was a living, breathing child in that empty cradle, and as her warning “sh-sh” rang through the room, Magdalen shuddered involuntarily, and felt a kind of terror of that crib, as if it held a goblin child. Suddenly Mrs. Grey turned to her and said: “You did not tell me your name, or else I have forgotten.” “My name is Magdalen Lennox,” was the reply, and instantly the black eyes flashed a keen look of curiosity upon the young girl, who winced a little, but never turned her own eyes away from those confronting her so fixedly. “Magdalen,” the woman said, “Magdalen. That brings it back to me in part. I remember now. That was the name I gave her when she was christened, because I thought it would please Arthur, who was over the sea. He wanted to call Alice that, but I was hot, and angry, and worried in those days, and my temper ran very high, and I would not suffer it, for out of Magdalen went seven devils, you know, and out of his Magdalen went fourteen, I’m sure. She was a beautiful woman, I heard, and he loved her better than he did me,—loved her first when he was young. I found it out when it was too late. His mother told me so one day when she couldn’t think of anything else to torment me with. The Duchess of Beechwood! She’s out under the snow now, and her monument is as tall as the Tower of Babel. She was a dreadful woman,—she and Clarissa both; that was her daughter, and they just worried and tormented and hunted me down, until I went away.”