“Well then, you were right about the plum-coloured moreen, Miss Penny. It served for the christening and the funeral just like the baked meats in _Hamlet_ that coldly furnished forth the wedding-feast,” she commented. “Only--this is what gets me. How about those golden ringlets?” “Dear me, dear me! I cannot understand!” cried Miss Penny in dismay. “Even now I seem to see that little thing as plain as day, toddling along beside Mr. Langley, in her fine white dress with the lace frill at the neck pressed down by those lovely long curls. I suppose I dreamed it.” “The fact is, Miss Penny, most everybody in the church feels just about so,” remarked her neighbour. She turned to Anna. “As I said to Miss Penny, the reason I am so sure about it all is because the marble lamb on their lot in the cemetery on Ella May’s grave was the last thing my cousin Alfred ever did. Mrs. Langley was so particular that it should be copied from life from a lamb that was just three days old same as the baby was when she passed away that Albert had to wait until spring to do it. He went off on a farm up in the hills beyond Marsden and stayed over two nights to make his sketches. He took to his bed that spring and never did another stroke of marble work. Mrs. Langley was more than satisfied with the monument and had it photographed and framed. The last I heard--which wasn’t very lately--the photograph stood on the marble-topped stand in her room close to her bed.” Anna’s eyes grew round. It seemed strange to hear Mrs. Phelps speak of Mrs. Langley as a person. Until to-day she had been hardly so much as a dim vision, a mere word, this woman who had been an invalid for more years than Anna had lived. She seemed far less a person than Ella May. And now to think of her--or to try to stretch her mind to think of her as Ella May’s mother and Mr. Langley’s wife gave the girl an uncanny feeling. And she couldn’t mention her in the present tense. “What was she like, Mrs. Phelps?” she asked in an hushed manner. “Mrs. Langley? O Anna, don’t ask me!” protested Mrs. Phelps. “She was pretty with soft dark eyes and fine brown hair the last time I saw her, but that was twenty-odd years ago.” “My goodness! Hasn’t anyone seen her since?” asked Anna. “It has been years and years, I don’t know just how many, since the last outsider saw her. She had neuralagy in her face and headache. The last I knew she had had one headache for ten years. I don’t know whether that one is still going on or whether she had begun on another.” “I wonder if Mr. Langley sees her?” Anna asked. “I believe he goes in once a day--he used to. But Bell Adams that keeps house for him takes care of Mrs. Langley and I guess she’s the only one that ever really sees her.”