Page:Tom Beauling (1901).pdf/39

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

to you, she would feel it her duty to take your son into her own family and do by him as by her own."

"You advise me," she said excitedly, "to leave my son with a woman who would bring him up as I was brought up—in a cold, dark house, with a cold, dark God in the parlor and a red-hot hell in the basement! That's what you would advise me to do!"

"Don't talk so wildly, Harmony," said Judge Tyler.

"Do you know what I hoped you would say," she said, without heeding—"what I expected you to say? I expected you to say, 'Harmony, I will look after your son to the best of my ability; I will be good to him, and see that he is brought up in the sunlight.' I expected you to take all the cares and worries of dying off my hands. And instead of that you say, 'Harmony, before you die, it would be perhaps advisable if you buried your son alive!'"

With that she burst into tears.

"Harmony," said the judge, "I don't