The woman in the rocking-chair was Miss Cynthia Badlam, second-cousin of Miss Silence Withers, with whom she had been living as a companion at intervals for some years. She appeared to be thirty-five years old, more or less, and looked not badly for that stage of youth, though of course she might have been handsomer at twenty, as is often the case with women. She wore a not unbecoming cap; frequent headaches had thinned her locks somewhat of late years. Features a little too sharp, a keen, gray eye, a quick and restless glance, which rather avoided being met, gave the impression that she was a wide-awake, cautious, suspicious, and, very possibly, crafty person. “I could n't help comin',” said Nurse Byloe, “we do so love our babies,--how can we help it, Miss Badlam?” The spinster colored up at the nurse's odd way of using the possessive pronoun, and dropped her eyes, as was natural on hearing such a speech. “I never tended children as you have, Nuss,” she said. “But I 've known Myrtle Hazard ever since she was three years old, and to think she should have come to such an end,--'The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked,'”--and she wept. “Why, Cynthy Badlam, what do y' mean?” said Nurse Byloe. “Y' don't think anything dreadful has come o' that child's wild nater, do ye?” “Child!” said Cynthia Badlam,--“child enough to wear this very gown I have got on and not find it too big for her neither.” [It would have pinched Myrtle here and there pretty shrewdly.] The two women looked each other in the eyes with subtle interchange of intelligence, such as belongs to their sex in virtue of its specialty. Talk without words is half their conversation, just as it is all the conversation of the lower animals. Only the dull senses of men are dead to it as to the music of the spheres. Their minds travelled along, as if they had been yoked together, through whole fields of suggestive speculation, until the dumb growths of thought ripened in both their souls into articulate speech, consentingly, as the movement comes after the long stillness of a Quaker meeting. Their lips opened at the same moment. “You don't mean”--began Nurse Byloe, but stopped as she heard Miss Badlam also speaking.