“Finally my father was injured by a falling building and for two years we were dependent on charity or, as some children used to say to me, we were county charges. I was so young then that I did not realize what it really meant. At last papa gave up his last breath of this life and the county buried him. Mamma’s rich relatives never came near during the trouble. After papa’s death, mamma obtained work in the home of a family in Milwaukee. She was housekeeper for an old gentleman of about sixty-five. His wife had died years before and his family now consisted of himself, two grown daughters and one son about twenty-two. I was then fourteen, and it was so arranged that I was to assist with the work and go to school. That all seemed very nice, for mamma and I could live together. All went well for a year, during which time my mother’s two brothers died and as they were the only remaining heirs to the large estate, their demise left my grandmother the only legal heir, as my grandfather had so provided in his will that my mother was entirely cut off. At the end of the first year in our Milwaukee position, Edmund Decker came home from college ready to do battle with the world. I felt the effects of the menial exactness of my position. I was but fifteen then, but he of twenty-three, fell in love with me and fearing his father’s objections, our meetings were secret. Oh, how I have watched and waited for him, and how the moments would fly as he held me in his arms and breathed words into my young ears that made the rich, warm blood of my youth leap and bound through my veins, while my lips and cheeks burned as though they were being bathed in fire. Alas, our anticipations were true; we were caught fairly in one of our little love-making scenes. It happened one afternoon when we supposed everyone was away. Edmund came to the house and we were having a tete-a-tete in a little alcove off the library. Nothing so bad about that, but one of the sisters who existed chiefly on suspicion, had hidden behind some heavy curtains, within three feet of us, and after hearing as much as she liked she stepped out of her hiding place and found me contentedly curled up on Edmund’s lap.