With a very expressive look, which seemed to say, "I know, but I shan't tell," Maggie seated herself at her grandmother's feet, and asked how long Hagar had been crazy. "Did it come upon her when her daughter died?" she inquired; and Madam Conway answered: "Yes, about that time, or more particularly when the baby died. Then she began to act so strangely that I removed you from her care, for, from something she said, I fancied she meditated harm to you."
For a moment Maggie sat wrapped in thought—then clapping her hands together she exclaimed: "I have it; I know now what ails her! She felt so badly to see you happy with me that she tried to poison me. She said she was sorely tempted—and that's the secret which is killing her."
"Secret! What secret?" cried Theo; and, womanlike, forgetting her resolution not to tell, Maggie told what she had seen and heard, adding it as her firm belief that Hagar had made an attempt upon her life.
"I would advise you for the future to keep away from her, then," said
Madam Conway, to whom the suggestion seemed a very probable one.
But Maggie knew full well that whatever Hagar might once have thought to do, there was no danger to be apprehended from her now, and the next day found her as usual on her way to the cottage. Bounding into the room where the old woman sat at her knitting, she exclaimed: "I know what it is! I know your secret!"
There was a gathering mist before Hagar's eyes, and her face was deathly white, as she gasped: "You know the secret! How? Where? Have the dead come back to tell? Did anybody see me do it?"
"Why, no," answered Maggie, beginning to grow a little mystified. "The dead have nothing to do with it. You tried to poison me when I was a baby, and that's what makes you crazy. Isn't it so? Grandma thought it was, when I told her how you talked last night."
There was a heavy load lifted from Hagar's heart, and she answered calmly, but somewhat indignantly, "So you told—I thought I could trust you, Maggie."
Instantly the tears came to Maggie's eyes, and, coloring crimson, she said: "I didn't mean to tell—indeed I didn't, but I forgot all about your charge. Forgive me, Hagar, do," and, sinking on the floor, she looked up in Hagar's face so pleadingly that the old woman was softened, and answered gently: "You are like the rest of your sex, Margaret. No woman but Hagar Warren ever kept a secret; and it's killing her, you see!"
"Don't keep it, then," said Maggie. "Tell it to me. Confess that you tried to poison me because you envied grandma," and the soft eyes looked with an anxious, expectant expression into the dark, wild orbs of Hagar, who replied: "Envy was at the bottom of it all, but I never tried to harm you, Margaret, in any way. I only thought to do you good. You have not guessed it. You cannot, and you must not try."