"Don't cry," said Gertrude, again, gently. "Of course I am not angry with you. I am sorry it happened, but--Ettie, who is _he?_" Ettie sobbed on, and held her arms close about Gertrude's neck. Again the older girl said, with lips close to the child's ear: "Don't you think it would be better to tell me who 'he' is? Is he so young as to not know better than to advise you that way, dear?" "He's forty," sobbed Ettie, "an' he's rich, an' he's got a girl of his own as big as me. I saw her one day in the store. He's the cashier." Gertrude shivered, and the child felt the movement. "Don't you ever, ever tell," she panted, "or he'll kill me--and so would pa." "Oh, he would, would he?" exclaimed Francis, who had stolen silently into the room and had stood unobserved in the darkness. "The cashier! the mean devil! I always hated his beady eyes, and he tried his games on me! But I'll kill him before he shall go--do you any real harm, Ettie! I will! I will! Why didn't you tell me? I watched for a while and then I thought--I thought he had given it up. Oh, Ettie, Ettie!" The tall form of the girl seemed to rise even higher in the darkness, and one could feel the fire of her great eyes. Her hands were clenched and her muscles tense. Ettie was sobbing anew, and Gertrude, holding her hand, was stroking the moist forehead and trying to quiet her. "Oh, Fan! Oh, Fan! I didn't want you to know," sobbed the child, with pauses between her words. "He said nobody needn't ever know if I'd do just's he told me. He said--but when pa came home I was so scared, an' I'm sick most all the time, an'--an', oh, if I wasn't so awful afraid to die I'd wisht I _was_ dead!" "Dead!" gasped Francis, grasping Ettie's wrist and pulling her hand from her face in a frenzy of the new light that was dawning upon her half-dazed but intensely stimulated mental faculties. She half pulled the smaller girl to her feet. "Dead! Ettie Berton, you tell me the God's truth or I'll tear him to pieces right in the store. You tell me the God's truth! has he--done anything awful to you?" A young tiger could not have seemed more savage, and Ettie clung with her other arm to Gertrude. "No! No! No!" she shrieked, and struggled to free herself from the clutch upon her wrist. Then with the pathetic superstition and ignorance of her type: "Cross my heart I Hope I may die!" she added, and as Francis relaxed her grasp upon the wrist, Ettie fell in an unconscious little heap upon the floor. Francis was upon her knees beside her in an instant, and Gertrude was about to ring for a light and for her mother when Francis moaned: "Oh, send for a doctor, quick. Send for a doctor! She was lying and she crossed her heart. She will die! She will die!" X.