"Can't it wait, Mrs. Smelts?" asked Nance, with a pitying hand on the feverish brow across which a long white scar extended.
"No. They're goin' to take me away in the mornin'. I heard 'em say so. It's about Birdie, Nance, I want to tell you. They've had to lock her up."
"It's the fever makes you think that, Mrs. Smelts. You let me sponge you off a bit."
"No, no, not yet. She's crazy, I tell you! She went out of her head last January when the baby come. Dan's kept it to hisself all this time, but now he's had to send her to the asylum."
"Who told you?"
"Dan did. He wrote me when he sent me the last money. I got his letter here under my pillow. I want you to burn it, Nance, so no one won't know."
Nance went on mechanically stroking the pain-racked head, as she reached under the pillow for Dan's letter. The sight of the neat, painstaking writing made her heart contract.
"You tell him fer me," begged Mrs. Smelts, weakly, "to be good to her. She never had the right start. Her paw handled me rough before she come, an' she was always skeery an' nervous like. But she was so purty, oh, so purty, an' me so proud of her!"
Nance wiped away the tears that trickled down the wrinkled cheeks, and tried to quiet her, but the rising fever made her talk on and on.
"I ain't laid eyes on her since a year ago this fall. She come home sick, an' nobody knew it but me. I got out of her whut was her trouble, an' I went to see his mother, but it never done no good. Then I went to the bottle factory an' tried to get his father to listen—"