"Oh, she wanted to see you," answered the old woman, in a croaking voice which seemed to Corinna to contain a sinister note. "As long as she was able to keep on her feet she used to go and sit in the Square just to watch you come out—"
"Do you mean that she cared for me like that?" asked the girl, in a hushed incredulous tone. "Was she really fond of me?"
The cripple turned her glassy eyes on the fresh young face. "Well, I don't know that she was fond," she responded bleakly, "but when you're as bad off as that, there ain't many things that you can think of."
A murmur fell from the lips of the dying woman, while she rolled her head slowly from side to side, as if she were seeking ease less from physical pain than from the thought in her mind. Her thick black hair, matted and damp where it had been brushed back from her forehead, spread like a veil over the pillow; and this sombre background lent a graven majesty to her features. At the moment her head appeared as expressionless as a mask; but in a few minutes, while they waited for returning consciousness, a change passed slowly over the waxen face, and the full colourless lips began to move rapidly and to form broken and disconnected sentences. For a time they could not understand; then the words came in a long sobbing breath. "It has been too long. It has been too long."
"That goes on all the time," said the old woman. "I've been up with her for three nights, and she rambles almost every minute. But sick folks are like that," she concluded philosophically. She had not laid down her knitting for an instant; and standing now beside the bed, she jerked the gray yarn automatically through her twisted fingers. The clicking of the long wooden needles formed an accompaniment to the dry, hard sound of her words.
"Why doesn't some one hush that child?" asked Corinna impatiently. Through the open window a breeze entered, bringing the thin restless wail of the baby.
"The mother tries, but she can't do anything. She thinks the milk went wrong and gave it colic."
The woman on the bed spoke suddenly in a clear voice. "Why doesn't he come?" she demanded. Raising her heavy lids she looked straight into Corinna's eyes, with a lucid and comprehending expression, as if she had just awakened from sleep.
Holding her knitting away from the bed with one hand, and bending over, until her deformed shape made a hill against the bedpost, the old woman screamed into the ear on the pillow, as if the hearer were either deaf or at a great distance. Though her manner was not heartless, it was as impassive as philosophy.
"He is coming," she shrieked.