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oking for something she couldn't find, and she says, as simple as though she was asking about the price of a bed-tick, 'It won't cost more than fifty dollars to bury me, I s'pose?' Well, that made me squeamish, for the poor dear's plight came home to me so clear, and she young enough yet to get plenty out of life, if she had the chance. So I asked her again about her people--whether I couldn't send for someone belonging to her. 'There's none that belongs to me,' she says, 'and there's no one I belong to.'
"I thought very likely she didn't want to tell me about herself; perhaps because she had done wrong, and her family had not been good to her. Yet it was right I should try and get her folks to come, if she had any folks. So I said to her, 'Where was your home?' And now, what do you think she answered, m'sieu'?' 'Look there,' she said to me, with her big eyes standing out of her head almost--for that's what comes to her sometimes when she is in pain, and she looks more handsome then than at any other time--'Look there,' she said to me, 'it was in heaven, that's where--my home was; but I didn't know it. I hadn't been taught to know the place when I saw it.'
"Well, I felt my skin go goosey, for I saw what was going on in her mind, and how she was remembering what had happened to her some time, somewhere; but there wasn't a tear in her eyes, and I never saw her cry- never once, m'sieu'--well, but as brave as brave. Her eyes are always dry--burning. They're like two furnaces scorching up her face. So I never found out her history, and she won't have the priest. I believe that's because she wants to die unknown, and doesn't want to confess. I never saw a woman I was sorrier for, though I think she wasn't married to the man that left her. But whatever she was, there's good in her--I haven't known hundreds of women and had seven sisters for nothing. Well, there she is--not a friend near her at the last; for it's coming soon, the end--no one to speak to her, except the woman she pays to come in and look aft