"Ach, yes! I can't remember any more. Now do what you want to do."
Hannah spoke like a judge sentencing a criminal: "So you thought she told lies and you whipped her—that little thing! Now I tell you something, Calista Yohe.
That night she was born I said to Mary—your sister Mary!—that once she came on Christmas she would be lucky and see more than we see, and Mary was glad, and the last thing she said was: 'I look after her. I take care of her.' And they say one that dies and leaves something unfinished must come back to finish it up. I guess Mary knew when to come.
"And you are glad. I don't say you just wished this to her, but you thought would be fine not to have her around once you got married to Conrad. She was lucky not to be here till you got a good hold of her.
"You might have thought whether I would let her with you that didn't want her, to be in the way. But I am old. It is a good thing Mary fetched her. Now I see to her myself. Don't you dare touch her."
Conrad had been perfectly still, with the face of a man in a nightmare, but now he went to the shaking woman and lifted her in his arms. Hannah looked at them for a moment. Then she set a great kettle of water to heat, took up the child and went out, leaving them alone together, and they heard her footsteps in the room above as she went back and forth, getting what she needed.
The White Sleep of Auber Hurn
BY RICHARD RICE
The thing happened in America; that is one reason for believing it. Another land would absorb it, or at least give a background to shadow over its likelihood, the scenery and atmosphere to lend an evanescent credibility, changing it in time to a mere legend, a tale told out of the hazy distance. But in America it obtrudes; it stares eternally on in all its stark unforgetfulness, absorbing its background, constantly rescuing itself from legend by turning guesswork and theory into facts, till it appears bare, irremediable, and complete,—witnessed at high noon, and in New Jersey of all places, flat, unillusive, and American.