"She must never know," answered Cynthia, while the tears streamed unheeded down her cheeks. "When she is carried out one day for her airing, she shall go back into the other house. It is a short time now at best--she may die at any moment from any shock--but she must die without knowing this. There must be quiet at the end, at least. Oh, poor mother! poor mother!" She raised her hands to her convulsed face, and Christopher saw the tears trickle through her thin fingers, "She must never know," repeated the boy. "She must never know if we can help it." "We must help it," cried Cynthia passionately. "We must work our fingers to the bone to help it, you and I." "And Lila?" asked the boy, curiously just even in the intensity of his emotion. "Mustn't Lila work, too?" Cynthia sobbed--hard, strangling sobs that rattled like stones within her bosom. "Lila is only a girl," she said, "and so pretty, so pretty." The boy nodded. "Then don't let's make Lila work," he responded sturdily. Selfish in her supreme unselfishness, the woman turned and kissed his brow, while he struggled, irritated, to keep her off. "Don't let's, dear," she said, and that was all. IX. Cynthia As soon as Christopher had passed out of sight, Cynthia came from the kitchen with an armful of wet linen and began spreading it upon some scrubby lilac bushes in a corner of the yard. After fifteen years it still made her uncomfortable to have Christopher around when she did the family washing, and when it was possible she waited to dry the clothes until he had gone back to the field. In her scant calico dress, with the furrows of age already settling about her mouth, and her pale brown hair strained in thin peaks back from her forehead, she might have stood as the world-type of toil-worn womanhood, for she was of the stuff of martyrs, and the dignity of their high resolve was her one outward grace. Life had been revealed to her as something to be endured rather than enjoyed, and the softer adornments of her sex had not withstood the daily splashes of harsh soapsuds--they had faded like colours too delicate to stand the strain of ordinary use. As she lifted one of her mother's full white petticoats and turned to wring it dry with her red and blistered hands, a look that was perilously near disgust was on her face--for though she had done her duty heroically and meant to do it until the end, there were brief moments when it sickened her to desperation. She was the kind of woman whose hands perform the more thoroughly because the heart revolts against the task. Lila, in her faded muslin which had taken the colours of November leaves, came to the kitchen doorway and stood watching her with a cheerful face. "Has Jim Weatherby gone, Cynthia?"