VOL. II.]

HIS TWO WIVES.1

BY MARY CLEMMER AMES.

CHAPTER XXII. LOSS FLIGHT.
"Oh, the stillness of the room
Where the children used to play!
Oh, the silence of the house,
Since the children went away!
This is the mother-life-

To bear, to love, to lose,'

Till all the sweet, sad tale is told
In a pair of little shoes,

In a single broken toy,

In a flower pressed, to keep
All fragrant still the faded life
Of one who fell asleep."

THUS Agnes wrote, out of the hush of her home and the loss of her heart, in a little manuscript book hidden in the inner drawer of her desk, which she thought no human eyes had ever seen save her own. She was mistaken. Linda had seen it, and knew every line that it contained.

Every mother who has buried a child knows what that "stillness" was - that silence that follows after a sweet voice hushed, a beloved step grown forever

still.

The rabbits still lived in their green house on the lawn, but little Vida fed them alone, pausing often, while she did it, to call upon the name of her brother in impassioned tones of childish sorrow. Since her first step she had been his inseparable companion, and now she seemed lost and most unhappy without her life-long playfellow.

There was a new shrine at Lotusmere. Into a little room at the head of the staircase Agnes had gathered everything that belonged to her boy. Here was his "trainer's" hat with its bright cockade, his silent drum, his box of tools, his books, his first boots. His mother with her own hands had folded and laid in the drawer of his little bureau every garment left of all that he had ever worn, from the dainty white frock made by her own hands before he was born, to the last new "sailor's suit," with its broad collar and bright buttons, that he lived to wear but once. It was with no morbid emotion that she shut herself in this room by the hour, communing with her child and with her own soul. A part of herself had passed into the impalpable; no less it seemed a part of her conscious existence; she could never be sundered from it. Her child could never be the less her child, -less living, less beloved. All others might outlive him, forget him, but not his mother. The mother-heart could never cease to miss the first-born fruit of its love and of its

1 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by H. O. HOUGHTOM & Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

[No. 11.

youth. He was not more her child than her daughter; but it seemed to her always that his mother must make up to him in tenderness for what the daughter had, and he had not,- his father's sympathy and pride.

When Cyril King looked upon the dead body of his boy, a keen pang of remorse shot through the natural sorrow that he felt for his loss. A thousand pleading looks and shy entreating words, but dimly noted and wholly unheeded, when they spoke to him from the eyes and lips of the living boy, now that the boy was dead, rose up to haunt him. He had never been proud of his son. All a boy in his predilections and habits, he nevertheless had his mother's organization. “A temperament well enough for a girl," his father would say, "but Vida is my boy. She ought to have been the boy." A reproduction of his mother in face and spirit, as that mother grew to be more and more a reproach to his father the boy became scarcely less so. Unconsciously, she was always trying to make up to him for the love and sympathy withheld by his father. Thus in a double sense she yielded up her life of life with him in death.

Yet the Lotusport mind concluded that "Mrs. King did not take the death of her boy very hard. I call such resignation unnatural," said Mrs. Prang, to whom it was meat and drink to attend a funeral and "go to the grave," especially the latter. It yielded her the double delight of taking a ride at somebody else's expense, and of taking an estimate of the exact degree of grief felt and exhibited by each " mourner."

"I call such resignation unnatural — in a mother!"' she said; "not a scrap of mournin' on, not even at the grave; not a sob,- not one! Poor Mr. King was just broken all to pieces. He has a heart. She just stood as white and as cold as if she was cut out of marble. I do and I will call such composure unnatural and unfeelin'. Of all the funerals I ever attended — and I do believe I've attended thousands never did I witness a parent bury a child with such willin'ness as Mrs. King. Don't tell me there ain't somethin' lackin' in that woman.”

Could Mrs. Prang have listened at the keyhole of the little room, her heart would have been gladdened by more than one sob, deep and low, breaking from that "resigned" mother's heart. Could she have pried into the inner pocket of that mother's work-basket she would have taken from it a bit of newspaper, worn with reading and blurred with tears, which bore these lines, that had welled out from another mother's heart:

"I wonder so that mothers ever fret

At little children clinging to their gown;
Or that the footprints, when the day is wet,
Are ever black enough to make them frown.
If I could find a little muddy boot,
Or cap, or jacket, on my chamber floor;

If I could kiss a rosy, restless foot,
And hear its patter in my home once more;
If I could mend a broken cart to-day,
To-morrow make a kite to reach the sky,
There is no woman in God's world could say
She was more blissfully content than I.
But ah! his dainty pillow next my own
Is never rumpled by his shining head;
My singing birdling from his nest has flown, -
The little boy I used to kiss is dead."

"And yet, and yet, my darling, I would not bring you back if I could. - not to suffer as you must have suffered in the body, in this world."

Mother-love uttered these words, and yet no less mother-love, in its inward wound, bled with loss and longing, never to be healed till reunited to the life it

had lost.

Agnes did not accept Mrs. Peppercorn's invitation, nor follow her advice. Whereupon that honorable lady in time came to regard Mrs. King as a very weakspirited person, utterly deficient in "backbone" and in a desire to cultivate one, and so far useless as a victim whose battles the combative lady was eager to fight. She never, however, withdrew the light of her countenance from her so far as to neglect to denounce "that Mrs. Sutherland" and the Hon. Cyril King, in both private and public places. To Cyril's astonishment he discovered one day that he had an active enemy, and his absent wife an active champion in high places, in the powerful person of Hon. Mrs. Peppercorn. This unlooked-for and late-learned knowledge was not without its outward effect. It gave the significance of consciousness to acts before often the result of mere carelessness in the actors. It made their association less public and more personal in its nature. Thus Mrs. Peppercorn, with the best of intentions, did more harm than good by interfering, as so often happens in this world. Her letter did not fail of inflicting its inevitable pain upon Agnes. It gave the form and substance of reality to what before had been doubt and fear in her mind, and a voiceless sorrow in her heart. But had the most that it suggested been true, it could not have impelled Agnes to appear as the accuser of her husband in the house of a stranger. Her inmost soul recoiled from uncovering her heart's wound to the eyes of the world. Besides, she waited, praying, hoping still that the glamour would pass.

He might falter, stray even in outward seeming for a season, but she only could ever be his wife; it was bitter, the draught she was drinking now, but it would pass; he would come back to his allegiance, to his wife, to his home.

She wrote to Mrs. Peppercorn, thanking her for her interest and intended kindness; but not acknowledging by a word that such kindness was needed. It was very hard for Mr. King to be alone, so overworked, etc. How could he survive in Washington at all, at such a season, without drives and fresh air? Mrs. Sutherland was very kind, and had invited his wife and children to drive as well as Mr. King, etc.

"Idiot!" was Mrs. Peppercorn's only ejaculation as she concluded the letter, and in the next breath tore it to atoms. "Idiot! but I have done my duty. She will rue the day she refused to make that man walk in the way he should go."

In the first pain of reading Mrs. Peppercorn's epistle, Agnes resolved to show it to Cyril on his return. But the more rapid decline of her boy made all else secondary in her thought and heart. In the autumn she did

The

not return to the capital for the short session of Congress. The condition of her child made it impossible, had Cyril desired it. He did not desire it. first winter had imparted an important fact to his knowledge that the Hon. Cyril King at a fashionable hotel would be a more important person in society than the same gentleman immured amid the smells of an obscure side-street boarding-house. The lodging and boarding of an entire family with servants at such a hotel was not in accordance with his finances, or with Washington prices. But it was in perfect consonance with his income that he himself should live at such an house while his family stayed at Lotusmere. Thus another gay season rushed on to the penitential door of Lent, and no man in public life was seen oftener at all the resorts of fashion than the Hon. Cyril King.

Mrs. King, who had failed to make a wide-spread impression upon the attention of society, was not greatly missed. For the personal friends who remembered and inquired for her, Cyril had ever ready the reply that he made to Mrs. Peppercorn when, in a crowded drawing-room where he stood for the moment wedged to the wall with Circe Sutherland on his arm, the uncompromising woman bore down upon him with the question, "How is your wife, Mr. King? I am sorry to see you here without her.”

"I share your sorrow, madam," he replied, with serene nonchalance, "but by the advice of our family physician Mrs. King remains at home this season with our invalid boy. Washington air was a great injury to him last winter."

Almost anywhere that the gay world met, the popular young member was seen. It was seen also that he escorted the beautiful Mrs. Sutherland less frequently than he did the winter before, when Mrs. King was in Washington. He danced with her occasionally, he escorted her to opera sometimes, but he was seen oftener with other ladies, as was she also with other gentlemen.

"There! you see it was only the idlest gossip, coupling the names of those two together as they were last spring," said Mrs. Midget to her friend Mrs. Pepper

corn.

"I see no such thing," answered that astute judge of manners and morals. "I formed my opinion on what I saw with my own eyes; and I've not changed it one iota. They're more to each other than they were last winter, that's why they think more of appearances and try to shy off remarks by going more with other people. Mark my words, Mrs. Midget, there is trouble ahead in that quarter."

Mrs. Peppercorn did not stint her words in any time or place. They found their way to Cyril King through more than one source. Agnes had a friend at court who, for aught he knew, reported his doings and seemings to her every day. Thus his letters grew silent on the time and strength consuming committee, and veered off on another tack.

"You remember," he wrote, "little Dilly Driver, the artist-lobbyist, don't you? But I know you will be astonished to hear that she has secured the last twenty thousand dollar appropriation, and is to paint the next historical picture for the Capitol. You know she hadn't the ghost of a chance when you went away. Apparently, she had not a ghost of one a week ago. The Thunderer is dead against her in the Senate. Nugent, we thought, had killed her in the House. He has been six months at work on the final speech that

was to annihilate her utterly. On the very day that he was to have made it, her bill passed, and she won the congressional commission against a dozen men competitors. You never saw a man so mad as Nugent (he is the chairman of the appropriation committee); his six months' speech, all his work and worry gone for naught, and the little fox with the commission in her pocket, in spite of him and half of Congress. It's the more maddening because if he hadn't been sick it could not have happened. You see, while he was shut up at home the little cormorant was busy from morning till night in the lobbies, calling out members, buttonholing senators, smiling at them, crying at them, shaking her ringlets at them, pleading with brown eyes full of tears, I'm a wee bit of a woman, a poor persecuted little girl, from whom a dozen great big men want to take away the chance of making a picture for government pay, because they want the fame and money themselves. Give me your vote?' What could the fellows do but give it — I, among the rest? Vaughn managed the bill. Half a dozen of the men who would not listen to her, who declared that she couldn't make a picture fit for the Capitol, and that it was a wrong to the country to let her try, were either away or at home sick, when up jumped Vaughn with the bill —and carried it. They were taking the vote, when in came Nugent, just up from a sick-bed, with his speech in his hand, determined to deliver it at the last moment, and if he was to be carried back to his bed after making it. Before he reached his seat he called out, I object!' It was of no use. The bill had passed. Dilly Driver had the commission, the twenty thousand dollars. And the Capitol is to have another daub to descend to posterity. Think of Nugent tugging away for six months on that speech, just for nothing! Everybody is wondering how Dilly Driver, who has neither training, experience, reputation, nor genius as an artist, and is a woman, got the commission. I've told you how.

death in one instant's flash, he saw himself as he was. All should be different. He would aunul the later sinful days. He would go back to the sinless years, and begin again to live. Alas! man giveth himself to sin through the weakness of his will and the strength of his desire. This need not have been true earlier. But it was not for such as he to clear his beclouded conscience of folly and passion, the accumulation of years, at a single sweep. His better nature was buried too deep beneath the world's débris for that. Little Cyril was buried in early May, and by early June his father, to all appearances, was as perpetually absorbed in the practice of his profession as he had been before he entered Congress. His life was lived in the city. Sometimes, in his devotion to a single "important suit," a week would pass without his appearing at Lotusmere at all. But when this happened he did not forget to brighten the interval with cheery notes and baskets of fruit sent to his wife.

One morning in early August Agnes received a note from him, saying,

"Put on your prettiest, Aggie; throw open the house and fill it with flowers as only you can, for I shall bring up a few friends this evening to tea, and after, we will have an impromptu musicale. Two of the ladies you know, Mrs. Sutherland and her Aunt Jessie. They will return in the eleven o'clock train. Shall come at six. In great haste, CYRIL."

She had not seen him for days. Speaking to her from his distant outer world, his words made a strange vibration in her still, inner life. They smote upon her heart and struck from it a throb of the old anguish which wrung it as a wife before death came. "How dare she come here!" said the passionate heart. "She has not forgotten what I said to her. She knows that all I ask, all I beg of her, is to leave me and mine alone. She knows that I have buried my boy — that I see no company-yet she comes."

She read the note over again. "I will try to be

He filled the winter with breezy letters to Agnes, full of impersonal gossip and news, but at the end of the session she knew nothing of what his own personal life had been. Her reply to Mrs. Peppercorn had not encouraged that lady to proffer any more gratuitous information. Even in his letters Cyril spoke to her out of another world; so remote it seemed to the one in which she lived and had her being. Every day, beside the couch of her boy, her own life grew more silent and inward. Now she sat in the awful hush which follows death. It was June again. Once more the oriole sang on the lawn; the kingfisher peered from his old perch on the rock; the doves basked in the sun; the fisherman sang in his boat; the great ships sailed by; the Sound spread forth to ear and eye all the eager activity of its multiform life. But beside a little grave, new made, just beyond the reach of its embracing waves, the mother's heart beat dumb to the voiceful energy without, as in inward musing she followed after that part of herself which had already passed into the unseen and the eternal. Cyril King, holding the arm of his wife within his, as he with her looked down upon the dead face of their first-born in his coffin, felt his heart stir with love and fidelity to her, the mother of that child, under all the rubbish of the world that lay upon its surface. In that heart-throb propelled by

invites her that she comes; surely she would not come, she would not dare to come, not to his home, to his wife, if she were not trying to do as I asked her. Perhaps because she is trying she comes where I am. I will try not to judge her harshly. I will do my duty. I will do as my husband asks me. I will make his home bright for his friends."

There could have been no home picture fairer in its outward seeming than that which greeted Cyril King and his guests as they passed through the gate of Lotusmere that evening. The low sun sent long lancelike rays quivering across trees and shrubs and flowers to the wide verandah, in whose open door stood Agnes dressed in white, with her bright-haired little daughter by her side, wearing the same spotless attire. The level sun-rays made a glinting nimbus about these white-robed figures, set amid emerald vines and clustering blossoms. Vida danced with joy at the sight of her father, and ran dancing down the avenue to meet him. Agnes came forward with a smile of greeting upon her face.

"Dear Mrs. King! I haven't seen you since we drove together in Washington, a year ago last spring," exclaimed Circe Sutherland, advancing before the others and going up to Agnes with a proffered kiss. "So long! and such sad things have happened to you,” she said in the softest voice. "You couldn't come to me,

so I have come to you," in tones of tenderest sympathy.

"Thank you," replied Agnes, in kindred tone, as she came forward to greet her other guests. Her motherheart, thus reminded of her lost child, was no proof against that voice.

In the parlor waited Linda, wearing deepest mourning. Nothing narrower than quarter of a yard folds of crape could express her grief or measure her loss. The tea-table, garnished with flowers and set with delicate viands, was all that even Circe Sutherland could desire. She overflowed with the subtlest and sweetest appreciation of everything. She heard nothing, she saw nothing, she tasted nothing that did not delight her, and she expressed her delight in voice and speech of equal music.

Certainly the drawing-room of Lotusmere never thrilled to such melody before, as flowed from her voice and from the touch of her fingers. Agnes' piano had found a new interpreter. Agnes herself, with all the soul of music in her, though it had never found its utmost expression through the organ of her voice, listened for the time entranced. She shrank with fright, when, rising from the piano, Mrs. Sutherland said,

"Do play one of your old ballads for us, Mrs. King. Your husband says that you play and sing them both so sweetly."

"I would if I could. It would be impossible now. I can imagine no music after yours, Mrs. Sutherland." "Thanks. How kind you are. And how glad I am to give you pleasure."

Cyril looked delighted with Agnes' words of appreciation, but he did not urge her to sing. She was thankful that he did not, and yet something in her heart made her want him to ask her. He did not, and as the evening went on she became more and more conscious that she was not in his thoughts. When he first arrived with his guests his thoughts were on appearances, and he was quite sufficiently attentive to his wife to fulfill the role of the proper husband. Now, as the beguiling voice floated through his home and filled all his senses, he yielded unconsciously to wonted habits; he was pervaded by the singer. He hovered near her, he turned her music. Polite to all, in his manner to her there was a consciousness, a difference, which others felt rather than saw. The dreadful sensation which struck through her heart at the ambassadors' ball (the only place where she had seen them together) again filled the breast of Agnes, the same sense of neglect, of aloneness. Now it came from the fact which made itself felt rather than seen. She sat the acknowledged mistress in her own parlor. As such her husband had shown her all deference. He was just for the present altogether absorbed in a beautiful musician. Yet the something more made itself felt even to the uninitiated.

"Mr. King has eyes and ears but for one," whispered low a lady in the background. "Nothing could be plainer."

"At least to Mrs. King," murmured back her companion. "How sorry I am I'm not married," she whispered sarcastically.

Nevertheless it was a "perfectly delightful evening." Each guest proclaimed it to be such, when about half past ten began the stir of departure. "Mrs. King, I have had such a charming time." "Mrs. King, we are so much indebted for a delightful evening," said each guest on his or her way to dressing-room or hat-rack.

"Good night, Aggie; I shall be home to-morrow by tea-time," said Cyril, slipping into the parlor, hat in

hand, while all his guests were out in pursuit of hats and wrappings.

"You are not going back to the city to-night, Cyril?" asked Agnes, with a face as white as her dress.

"I must, Agnes, in common politeness. Mrs. Sutherland and her aunt have no escort, while the other ladies have. It will be midnight when they reach the city. They must not go alone from the station even to their own carriage. I invited them, and I must see them safely home. Did you ever hear such a voice before?"

Why, as he lifted his face, did he pause and look upon hers again, as if he were taking it into his mind to carry away with him? He certainly knew not why he did it. The hall resounded with the ejaculations, the laughter, the merriment, which always accompanies the breaking up of an informal social party. Agnes forced herself to the door, forced her mouth to smile, if her eyes refused, forced her lips to utter words of pleasant farewell.

"I don't intend that hospitality shall always remain on one side," said Mrs. Sutherland, as she lifted her face from kissing two unreturning lips. "The very first visit you make must be to me. Must it not, Mr. King? You must come and stay with me a whole week. What music we will have! And we will go everywhere. Say you will come soon; do, that's a darling. Can't you make her say that she will, Mr. King?" with a pretty parting pout.

"No. I never yet made her say anything that she did not choose to say. You are a stubborn little woman, aren't you, Aggie? But of course she will very soon visit you with me, Mrs. Sutherland."

"I shall never visit Mrs. Sutherland," said Agnes in the open door.

This sentence, uttered with startling distinctness, fell like a bomb amid the little group standing before her on the piazza. Till she uttered it, her manner had been that of a faultless hostess. In one breath she undid all that she had suffered so much to do through the entire evening. They had borne upon her too long. By one request Circe Sutherland over-played her part. It was the one thing that Agnes could not bear. The truth outraged within her arose, and in defiance of all conventionality said its one say. No soft society word came in response to such impolitic sincerity.

"Good night," said the party simultaneously, turned, and left. Agnes, standing in the door alone, watched them out of sight beyond the garden avenue, then, without a word, ascended to her own room, in which Vida waited asleep in her crib. No sleep touched with healing her young mother's lids that night. She arose as she lay down, with open, tearless eyes. She made no response to Linda's hints, which insinuated plainly enough that she was conscious of all that transpired the evening before. The house still seemed full of the voice that filled it with music the night before. She wanted to get away from it, and for the first time since her boy's death went out to her old seat on the pier. The salt breeze blew refreshingly over her hot eyelids and cheeks. She looked away over the gleaming plain of waters to the far, low-lying hills, to the distant ships

moving out to the ocean, as if she were never to follow them again. Her eyes came back from their outward journey, and with the same brooding farewell light rested on every familiar object that helped to make dear her home: the flowers that she had tended, the elm that shaded the lawn, the little graves that had grown green in its shadow.

"Cyril coming home to tea! He promised that before I spoke. He will not come now. If he did, he would not speak to me. He will never forgive me, never. What is it in me that will speak out when everything seems false and hollow about me? I couldn't help it. I didn't want to speak, and yet I did, and he will never forgive me. Cyril was never so far from me as he is at this moment. I feel as if I might never see him again. Yet he is coming home to tea." Vida had flitted back and forth about her mother, like a butterfly, all day. It was hours past noon, when Agnes took the chubby little hand in hers, and went back with her to the house; then Vida went in pursuit of her "Auntie Linda," and Agnes again entered into the refuge of her own room. As she went in, she saw what seemed to be an open note on her bureau. She went to it, and found it to be a letter without an envelope, in Cyril's hand. She opened it. It began, "My only love." Had he by some means placed this here to reassure and comfort her aching, loving, and desolate heart? How it fluttered in her breast. It seemed as if it would stop beating with sudden joy, as she read, "My only love; life is valueless without you. Why should I struggle any longer against a fate that I cannot arrest! God knows that I do not want to love you. But because you live I have no power to help it. My fate is in your hands. You remind me of my fame, my family, of all I have at stake. You command me to forget you. You know that is impossible. I can part with fame, family, everything but you. I will not be separated from you. I cannot be. If you want to save me from ruin, come back, where at least in the distance I can see your lovely face, - where at least, amid the crowd, I can listen to your voice. It is too late to tell me of her; that it is for her sake that you went away. It is for my sake that you must come back! If I were never to see your face again, and to know that it was she who had banished you, I should hate her, hate the sight of her. Only by coming back can you make me tolerate the thought of her. Only by so doing can you help her. You cannot make her more than she is, or more than she is to me. No one knows this better than you. Then, Circe, why do you torture me? Will you drive me to ruin, or will you come where I am, where I may see you, and live?"

Agnes looked at the date. It bore that of June, of the year before; a month before Mrs. Peppercorn wrote her. As she opened the letter, another dropped out, written on tinted paper, and in the most delicate hand. It began, "My Fate, I can but obey your command. Your life cannot be poorer than mine, robbed as it is of the light of your eyes."

Agnes read no more, till she came to the signature, "Circe." She walked slowly to her desk, opened it, sat down; again opened the two letters, and read every word of each, from beginning to end. She then laid one in the other, and without an added word, placed both in one envelope, and directed it to her husband at his city office. She wrote another brief letter, directed it, placed both in her pocket, arose, put on her

bonnet, and a moment later, Linda, looking out of her window with Vida by her side, said, "Look, baby! there goes your mamma. Where does baby think she is going?"

"Dun know. Baby wants to go wid mamma."

"Oh no! baby wants to stay with Auntie Linda." "No s'e don't," with an emphaticscre am, and a rush for her battered little garden hat.

"But baby will stay with auntie," said Linda, taking her into her arms with a wicked gleam in her eyes. Agnes dropped both letters into the near post-office box, and then with slow but steady steps, that she might attract no attention, passed down the village street to what was called "The Front," from whence numerous dusty and mouldy piers jutted out into the water, with every variety of water-craft hugging their sides. She did not glance at any till she came to one beside which lay a staunch schooner, that moment receiving into its hold the load of fragrant lumber which was to be its next load of merchandise to Boston. was trig and new, and bore upon its bow and stern, in golden letters, the name of "Agnes." She knew her way down, for she had been here more than once before, with little Cyril.

It

"Is Captain Ben aboard?" she asked softly, of “ a hand" who paused an instant in taking in the lumber and lifted his cap to a lady whom he knew.

"Yes, he is," said the man. "I will go and tell him who wants to see him." And as he passed her and caught the look in her eyes, he said inly, "They are full of trouble. No trouble should come anigh that lovely lady if I could help it. She as has so feelin' a heart for the poor. This very vessel a-named for her because on it."

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Captain Ben, may I speak to you a moment below?" she asked.

"A moment or an hour, Mrs. King, as long as you please." And he led the way to his cabin.

"Captain Ben, I know that you are my friend," she said, with trembling voice. "Because I know that I can trust you, I come to you in my trouble. When you start to-night, I want you to take me and my little girl with you to Boston. If necessary, I want you to hide us out of sight. I want you to keep any human being from getting us before you sail. Will you, Captain Ben?

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"I'll do anything you ask me, to do, Mrs. King. I'll hide you and defend you with my life, if necessary." I believe you, but it will not be necessary. Nobody will take the trouble to come after me," she said mournfully. "I was foolish to have thought of such a thing. When do you start?"

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Well, we should have started at sunset. But I will wait for you. When will you be likely to come? "Not till dark. I can't. Will you be on the lookout for me, Captain Ben?"

"I will come for you if you say so, Mrs. King, and will carry your little girl. And I will run down to the house for Mary. She often takes the trip. It will be pleasanter for you, Mrs. King, to have a woman on board, and she will look after the little girl."