" She shrank back as she saw his face, but I
assured her with, "Poor sick man! He can't get up; he wants to see you."
She looked like an angel, her bright face framed in golden curls and her
eyes tender and pitiful. In her hands she held the flowers that she had
picked from the purple sage, and, bending toward him, she said: "I'm sorry
for 'ou, sick man. Will 'ou have a posy?"
He laid his great, bony hand beyond the flowers, on the plump hand of the
child, and tears came to his eyes, as he said: "I had a little girl once.
_Her_ name was Mamie. _She cared for me_. Nobody else did. Guess I'd been
different if she'd lived. I've hated everybody since she died."
I knew at once that I had the key to the man's heart. The thought came
quickly, born of that midnight prayer service, and I said, "When I spoke of
your mother and your wife, you cursed them; I know now that they were not
good women, or you could not have done it."
"Good women! O, _you_ don't know nothin' 'bout that kind of woman! You
can't think what they was!"
"Well, if your little girl had lived and grown up with them, wouldn't she
have been like them? Would you have liked to have her live for that?"
He evidently had never thought of that, and his great eyes looked off for a
full minute.
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