Ettie was sobbing anew, and Gertrude, holding her hand, was stroking the moist forehead and trying to quiet her.
"Oh, Fan! Oh, Fan! I didn't want you to know," sobbed the child, with pauses between her words. "He said nobody needn't ever know if I'd do just's he told me. He said—but when pa came home I was so scared, an' I'm sick most all the time, an'—an', oh, if I wasn't so awful afraid to die I'd wisht I was dead!"
"Dead!" gasped Francis, grasping Ettie's wrist and pulling her hand from her face in a frenzy of the new light that was dawning upon her half-dazed but intensely stimulated mental faculties. She half pulled the smaller girl to her feet.
"Dead! Ettie Berton, you tell me the God's truth or I'll tear him to pieces right in the store. You tell me the God's truth! has he—done anything awful to you?" A young tiger could not have seemed more savage, and Ettie clung with her other arm to Gertrude.
"No! No! No!" she shrieked, and struggled to free herself from the clutch upon her wrist. Then with the pathetic superstition and ignorance of her type: "Cross my heart I Hope I may die!" she added, and as Francis relaxed her grasp upon the wrist, Ettie fell in an unconscious little heap upon the floor.
Francis was upon her knees beside her in an instant, and Gertrude was about to ring for a light and for her mother when Francis moaned: "Oh, send for a doctor, quick. Send for a doctor! She was lying and she crossed her heart. She will die! She will die!"
X.
But Ettie Berton did not die. Perhaps it would have been quite as well for her if she had died before the impotent and frantic rage of her father had still further darkened the pathetically appealing, love-hungry little heart, whose every beat had been a throbbing, eager desire to be liked, to please, to acquiesce; to the end that she should escape blame, that she might sail on the smooth and pleasant sea of general praise and approval.
Alas, the temperament which had brought her the dangerous stimulus of praise, for self-effacement, had joined hands with opportunity to wreck the child's life—and no one was more bitter in his denunciation than her father's friend and her aforetime admirer—Representative King. "If she was a daughter o' mine I'd kill her," he repeated to his own household day after day. "She sh'd never darken my door agin. That's mighty certain. It made me mad the other day to hear Berton talk about takin' her back home. The old fool! What does he want of her? An' what kind of an example that I'd like t' know t' set t' decent girls? I told him right then an' there if he let his soft heart do him that a'way I was done with him for good an' all, n' if I ketch you a goin' up there t' see her agin, you can just stay away from here, that's all!" This last had been to Francis, and Francis had shut her teeth together very hard, and the glitter in her eyes might have indicated to a wiser man that it was not chiefly because of his presence there that this daughter cared to return to her home after her clandestine visits to Ettie Berton. A wiser man, too, might have guessed that the prohibition would not prohibit, and that poor little Ettie Berton would not be deserted by her loyal friend because of his displeasure.