"She has an old red cloak which at times she wraps around a shawl, and cuddles it as if it were a baby, crooning some negro melody she heard South. There must have been a little child who died, but she is not clear on the subject. Sometimes it is a baby; sometimes a grown girl; sometimes it died in one place; sometimes in another; but always just before she was going to sing, and the room was full of coffins until she sank down, and knew no more. Whether my uncle has taken pains to inquire about the child, I don't know. He does not like children, and is satisfied to have Amy back, and is trying to atone for his former harshness. He calls her Amy, instead of Eudora, because the latter was the name by which she was known in the Homer Troupe, and he saw it flaunted on a handbill advertising the last concert in which she took part. "Don't think I have heard all this from him. He is tighter than the bark of a tree with regard to his affairs, and I do not think any one in the town knows anything definite about her singing in public, or the asylum; but there is a servant, Peter, who has grown old in the family. He knows everything, and has told me about my uncle bringing the child home, and how she cried for days for Shaky, a colored man, and slept in the red cloak, and kept it around her in the day-time because he gave it to her. I have learned that she was never lawfully adopted, and that my uncle has made no will. Still she must be something to him, but certainly not his lawful child, or why his reticence with regard to her. I am the only near relative bearing the Crompton name. I have made myself very necessary to him--am in fact, in a way, a son of the house. He is very much broken, and if he dies without a will-- "Well, all things come to him who waits, and I can afford to wait in such comfortable quarters. Do you catch on, and call me a scamp with your Puritanical notions? Not so fast, old fellow. You have chosen to earn your living delving at the law. I earn mine by being so useful to my uncle that he will not part with me. He has already made me a kind of agent to attend to his business, so that I look upon myself as permanently fixed at Crompton House for as long as I choose to stay. It is a grand old place, with an income of I do not know how many thousands, and if I should ever be fortunate enough to be master, I shall say that for once in his life Howard Crompton was in luck. I want you to come here, Jack, when you have finished visiting your sister. I asked my uncle if I could invite you, and he said, 'Certainly; I like to have young people in the house. It pleases Amy.' "This is wonderful, as they say he used to keep young people away, almost with lock and key, when she was young. But now anything which pleases Amy pleases him.