“Do you know where my husband is?” she asked a little later of the neighboring woman who was caring for her. “No, but I can try and find him.” In her own mind she thought it would be no difficult task. “It’s no matter,” was the weary answer of the wife, who had sadly learned long before that her husband’s presence was slight cause for happiness. “Tell him good-by for me, and to send a letter he will find in my workbox to my mother; so she will know that I asked her forgiveness before I died. And I want her, as I know she will for my sake, to take my child.” Her voice that had been growing weaker and weaker failed as she whispered the last word. A slight coughing-fit followed, there were a few fluttering breaths, and the nurse who had been holding her hand laid it softly down. “Oh, what is the matter with my mamma?” cried Posey in a frightened tone. “What makes her look so white; and lie so still? Mamma, Mamma, speak to me, do!” But the ear that had always listened to her slightest call, would hear her no more. And the woman lifting kindly in her arms the now motherless child, terror-stricken and sobbing, though too young to understand the great loss and sorrow that had come to her, carried her gently from the room. When the absent husband at last came home and was told his wife’s last message he listened to it moodily. “I don’t know any great reason she had to ask her mother’s forgiveness, just because she married me,” he said. “I’m not the worst man in the world, by a long way, if her mother did make such a fuss about it. And as for letting her have Posey to bring up and set against me, I’ll do nothing of the kind. I can take care of my own child, and I shall do it.” A natural and praiseworthy sentiment, this last, had he been a sober, industrious man, but unfortunately for himself and all connected with him he was neither. As a consequence, in the days that followed his little girl suffered much from neglect, and often from privation. Sometimes he feasted her on candy and sweetmeats till she was almost sick, and again, and more often, he left her to fare as best she might, and go hungry unless some neighbor fed her, while many were the nights she lay awake trembling in the darkness in her little bed, afraid of the dark, and almost more afraid of hearing the unsteady steps that would announce a drunken father. But when her mother had been dead less than a year, there was a disturbance one evening in a near-by saloon. Revolvers were used, and one man, present but not involved in the quarrel, was fatally wounded. Posey never saw her father again. Taken to a hospital, public charity cared for him in his last hours and laid him in his grave. When they came to tell his child of his death they found her playing merrily with a doll she had made for herself of a rolled-up apron and a little shoulder-shawl.