after hour in the adjoining room, her bright little eyes peered through the dimness to the row of white cardboard squares stretched along the back of her bureau. They were the pictures of the children. She couldn't see their features, but she felt that they were all conspiring together there on her bureau, just as they had down-stairs on the porch, repeating over and over again the things she had heard them say—the cruel things that had stabbed and hurt.
She didn't cry. That was characteristic. She had learned not to. She only lay and stared, and turned over at intervals of every ten minutes. Once in a while she would whisper out loud, "so that's the story," or, "I must warn Mrs. Jesse," or, grimly, "Well—well, wrong all these years!" and finally before she fell asleep, just before dawn, "I'll do it if it kills me," she declared.
"Mrs. Jesse," she said next day to her neighbor over the picket-fence, as she stopped to leave an offering of two heads of lettuce and a cucumber, "you know what a great talk I gave you the other day about keeping alive sentiments. Well, I knew a woman once who was terribly fond of a sick cat, but she tended and handled it so constant that it died. Keeping alive sentiments is something like keeping alive sick cats—
