Page:Dorothy Canfield--Hillsboro People.djvu/308

 such rags ... such dirt ... and 'twan't her fault either! She's ... why she's like anybody ... like a person s cousin they never happened to see before ... why, they were all folks!" she cried out, her tired old mind wandering fitfully from one thing to another.

"You didn't find the little boy in the asylum?" I asked.

"He was dead before I got there," she answered.

"Oh ...!" I said again, shocked, and then tentatively, "Had he ...?"

"I don't know whether he had or not," said Cousin Tryphena, "I didn't ask. I didn't want to know. I know too much now!" She looked up fixedly at the mountain line, high and keen against the winter sky, "Jombatiste is right," she said again unsparingly, "I hadn't ought to be enjoying them ... their father ought to be alive and with them. He was willing to work all he could, and yet he ... here I've lived for fifty-five years and never airned my salt a single day. What was I livin' on? The stuff these folks ought to ha' had to eat ... them and the Lord only knows how many more besides! Jombatiste is right ... what I'm doin' now is only a drop in the bucket!"

She started from her somber reverie at the sound of a childish wail from the house.... "That's Sigurd ... I knew that cat would scratch him!" she told me with instant, breathless agitation, as though the skies were falling, and darted back. After a moment's hestitation [sic] I, too, went back and watched her bind up with stiff, unaccustomed old fingers the little scratched hand, watched the frightened little boy sob himself quiet on her old knees that had never before known a child's soft weight,