By this time, on divers occasions, she had spoken to Amos of her South Carolina home. Once she told him (in a few words, and her voice was quiet, but her hands trembled) of the yellow-fever time on the lonely plantation in the pine woods, and how in one week her uncle, her brother and his wife, and her little niece had died, and she with her own hands had helped to bury them. “It was no wonder I didn’t see things all right after that,” she said. Another time she showed him a locket containing the old-fashioned yellow photograph of a man in a soldier’s uniform. “He was considered very handsome,” said she. Amos found it a handsome face. He would have found it so under the appeal of those piteous eyes had it been as ugly as the Colonel’s. “He was killed in the war,” she said; “shot while he was on a visit to us to see my sister. He ran out of the house, and the Yan—your soldiers shot him. It was the fortune of war. I have no right to blame them. But if he hadn’t visited our fatal roof he might be living now; for it was in the very last year of the war. I saw it. I fell down as if shot myself—better if I had been.” “Well, I call that awful hard,” said Amos; “I should think you would have gone crazy!” “Oh no, sir, no!” she interrupted, eagerly. “My mind was perfectly clear.” “But how you must have suffered!” “Yes, I suffered,” said she. “I never thought to speak of it.” A week after this conversation her nephew came. The day was September 3d. Nevertheless, on that Wednesday night she summoned Amos. He had been out in the country; but Mrs. Raker had heard through little Minnie Foley, who came for some crab-apples and found Miss Clark moaning on the cellar floor. The jail being but a few blocks away, Mrs. Raker was on the scene almost as soon as George Washington. By the time Amos arrived the two doctors had gone and Miss Clark was in bed, and the white bedspread or white pillows under her head were hardly whiter than her face. “Mrs. Raker’s making some gruel,” said she, feebly, “and if you’ll stay here I have something to say. It’s an odd thing, you’ll think,” she added, wistfully, when he was in the arm-chair by her bed (it was one of the chairs from the other room, he noticed)—“an odd thing for a miserable old woman with no kin and no friends to be loath to leave; but I’m like a cat, I reckon. It near tore my soul up by the roots to leave the old place, and now it’s as bad here.” “Don’t you talk such nonsense as leaving, Miss Clark,” Amos tried to console her. But she shook her head. And Amos, recalling what the doctors said, felt his words of denial slipping back into his throat. He essayed another tack. “Don’t you talk of having no friends here either. Why, poor Mrs. O’Shea has blued all my shirts that she was washing, so they’re a sight to see—all for grief; and little Mamie Foley ran crying all the way down the street.” “The poor child!” “And why are you leaving _me_ out?” “I don’t want to leave you out, Mr. Sheriff—”