"Her name? It was Mrs. Moreland, sir, and she looked about thirty year old—a pretty little blue-eyed lady, quite broken down with trouble and grief. She came on here a few days ago from New York, and was going home to her friends in London."
"Ah! and was she alone? Did she talk with you much, and tell you the cause of her trouble?"
"She did talk to me sometimes. She seemed lonely and unsettled-like, and I thought it did her good to talk to some wan of her trials. A sore heart, ye know, sir, is all the betther for telling its griefs over to a sympathizing heart," said Annie, apologetically.
"Yes," said Keene, a little impatiently, "but you have not told us what her trouble was."
"To be sure," answered Annie, good-humoredly. "She had come over some two years since from London with her husband to seek a better fortune, and just when they were so snugly settled down in a dear little home in Brooklyn, and beginning to do well in the world, and wan little baby-bird come to make sunshine in the home, the husband and baby sickened and died, wan after the other, sir, and the poor heart-broken widdy is just going back to her friends almost crazy with the grief of it all," concluded Annie, quite breathless with her long speech.
A sparkle of blue lightning flashed in Keene's eyes.
"She had lost a child, you said?"
"Yes, sir, a pretty boy, scarce a year old. She showed me a photograph of them all—five little ones she had lost, he the last of them all—black-eyed, curly-headed little beauties they were—like their poor father, she said."
"And she was inconsolable at the loss of the baby?"
"Yes, sir; she fretted for it all the long days, sir—not quite right in her head, she was not, I know, but," said Annie, wiping away a glittering tear from her pink cheek, "it were pitiful like to see her a tossing on the sofa, and moaning, and like as not laughing wildly as she talked of baby Earle, as she called him."