“Nobody could keep it up,” she went on deliberately, giving me the sum of her silent rumination, “a secret like that. Always guarding, always watching, always afraid the other one would do something to give it away! Between watching it and each other they must have been wore out. Beats me how old Mis’ Hawes never got on to it. She must ’a’ been dead.”
“It died before she did; I saw the little coffin in the vault.”
“How did it die?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did you go over to the cemetery for?”
“To see if the captain was in his coffin.”
“Was he?”
“Yes,—that is, the coffin was there; I didn’t open it.”
“I would ’a’!” said Mrs. Dove.
It struck me that she had put her finger on two weak parts of the story. I was resting on the belief that I knew all there was to know about the history of Mattie’s life, but it was true that I had not looked inside any of the coffins, and it was equally true that I did not know—yet—how the child met his death.