Again the room grew still. The ticking of the clock and the beat of raindrops on the windowpanes mingled with the soft purring of the fire's flames, and each waited, we knew not for what; and then Etta spoke. "But you, too, would have to pay--if he were made to pay--the price." She looked at Selwyn. "It is not fair that you should pay. I will go away--somewhere. It does not matter about the baby or me. Thank you, but-- Good-by. I'm going--away." Before I could reach her, hold her back, she was out of the room and running down the steps and the front door had closed. Mrs. Mundy looked up as I leaned over the banister. "It is better to leave her alone to-day," she said, and I saw that she was crying. "We can see her to-morrow. She had better be by herself for a while." Back in the room Selwyn and I looked at each other with white and troubled faces. We had bungled badly and nothing had been done. "Come to-morrow night. I must see David Guard, must see Etta again, before I-- Come to-morrow and I will tell you. I must be sure." I turned toward Harrie, but he had gone into the hall. Quickly my hands went out to Selwyn, and for a long moment he held them in his, then, without speaking, he turned and left me. CHAPTER XXIX I know I should not think too constantly about it. I try not to, but I cannot shake off the shock, the horror of Etta's death. Selwyn inclosed the note she wrote him in the letter he sent me just before leaving with Harrie for the West, but he did not come to see me before he left. When I try to sleep the words of Etta's note pass before me like frightened children, crying--crying, and then again these children sing a dreary chant, and still again the chant becomes a chorus which repeats itself until I am unnerved; and they seem to be calling me, these little children, and begging me to help make clean and safe the paths that they must tread. I am just one woman. What can I do? I knew Etta was dead before Selwyn received her note. Mrs. Banch, the woman who kept the child for her, came running to Mrs. Mundy the day after Etta had been to see me, and incoherently, sobbingly, with hands twisting under her apron, she told us of finding Etta, with the baby in her arms, lying on her bed, as she thought, asleep. But she was not asleep. She was dead. "She had done it as deliberate as getting ready to go on a long journey," the woman had sobbed. "Everything was fixed and in its place, and after bathing and dressing the baby in a clean gown, she wrote on a piece of paper that all of its clothes were for my little girl, and that she wouldn't do what she was doing if there was any other way." With a fresh outburst of tears, the woman handed me a half-sheet of note-paper. "Bury us as we are," it read. "I am taking the baby with me.--Etta."