stood in the corner, and went out, swearing. They opened the box with no little curiosity; it was one that had come with Eva from England; and in it they found the lavender silk gown, some beautiful old embroidery, and a wreath of flowers made of feathers (“I guess she had kept ’em for Paulie to play with,” the woman who told me said), one of Paulie’s poor little flour-bag garments, and, underneath all the rest, some fine linen sheets and beautiful blankets. When they asked her why she had not used these, Eva faintly answered that Joel had feared they would get injured by the smoke, which indeed at that very moment, oozing forth from the defective chimney, was inflaming the eyes and hindering the breath of the dying. For Eva was dying at last. The long imprisonment, the dark discipline, among these happy hills, was done.
“And, my word, she died game!” the neighbour told me. “Never a whimper out of her, not a single word of all that she’d gone through. Just you think what a life she’d had of it up there—cut off from everybody, with them hills an’ nothin’ but them hills, year in, year out . . . an’ then Paulie dyin’, an’ that way, too, all along of her father . . . an’ she herself dyin’ for years, a inch at a time—cancer in the breast, it was. An’ Joel! there! I can’t stand to speak of him, the brute! When we come to lay her out, there was marks of his givin’ black an’ blue on her poor body, an’ we’d to bury her in that laylock gown, for he’d give us nothin’ else. An’ yet, with all that, she never let on, not she! When she asked was she dyin’, an’ we told her yes, her poor face did kind o’ shine out, an’ no wonder; but that was all. An’
