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“But the man! the other wife! how could they?”

“Oh, Jim’s wife’s a pretty tough-hided creatur’, an’ as for him, I al’ays thought the way Nancy behaved took him kind o’ by surprise, an’ he had to give her her head, an’ let her act her pleasure. But it made a sight o’ town talk. Some say Nancy ain’t quite bright to carry on so, an’ the women-folks seem to think she’s a good deal to blame, one way or another. Anyhow, she’s had a hard row to hoe. Here we be, an’ there’s Hannah at the foreroom winder. You won’t think o’ goin’ over to Nancy’s till arter supper, will ye?”

When I sat alone beside Nancy’s bed, that night, I had several sides of her sad story in mind, but none of them lessened the dreariness of the tragedy. Before my brief acquaintance with her, Nancy was widely known as a travelling-preacher, one who had “the power.” She must have been a strangely attractive creature, in those early days, alert, intense, gifted with such a magnetic reaching into another life that it might well set her aside from the commoner phases of a common day, and crowned, as with flame, by an unceasing aspiration for the highest. At thirty, she married a dashing sailor, marked by the sea, even to the rings in his ears; and when I knew them, they were solidly comfortable and happy, in a way very reassuring to one who could understand Nancy’s temperament; for she was one of those who, at every step, are flung aside from the world’s sharp corners, bruised and bleeding.

As to the storm and shipwreck of her life, I learned no particulars essentially new. Evidently her husband had suddenly run amuck, either from the monotony of his inland days, or from the strange passion he had conceived for a woman who was Nancy’s opposite.

That night, I sat in the poor, bare little room, beside the billowing feather-bed where Nancy lay propped upon pillows, and gazing with bright, glad eyes into my face, one thin little hand clutching mine with the grasp of a soul who holds desperately to life. And yet Nancy was not clinging to life itself; she only seemed to be, because she clung to love.

“I’m proper glad to see ye,” she kept saying, “proper glad.”

We were quite alone. The fire burned cheerily in the kitchen stove, and a cheap little clock over the mantel ticked unmercifully fast; it seemed in haste for Nancy to be gone. The curtains were drawn, lest the thrifty window-plants should be frostbitten, and several tumblers of jelly on the oilcloth-covered table bore witness that the neighbors had put aside their moral scruples and their social delicacy, and were giving of their best, albeit to one whose ways were not their ways. But Nancy herself was the centre and light of the room,–so frail, so clean, with her plain nightcap and coarse white nightgown, and the small checked shawl folded primly over her shoulders. Thin as she was, she looked scarcely older than when I had seen her, five years ago; yet since then she had walked through a blacker valley than the one before her.

“Now don’t you git all nerved up when I cough,” she said, lying back exhausted after a paroxysm. “I’ve got used to it; it don’t trouble me no more’n a mosquiter. I want to have a real good night now, talkin’ over old times.”

“You must try to sleep,” I said. “The doctor will blame me, if I let you talk.”

“No, he won’t,” said Nancy, shrewdly. “He knows I ‘ain’t got much time afore me, an’ I guess he wouldn’t deny me the good on’t. That’s why I sent for ye, dear; I ‘ain’t had anybody I could speak out to in five year, an’ I wanted to speak out, afore I died. Do you remember how you used to come over an’ eat cold b’iled dish for supper, that last summer you was down here?”