When started, however, the good woman could no more "slow down" than her
French pony would stop when its head was turned homewards from market.
So she kept on with the history of the woman down the street.

"Heart disease," she said, nodding with assurance and finality; "and we
know what that is--a start, a shock, a fall, a strain, and pht! off the
poor thing goes. Yes, heart disease, and sometimes with such awful pain.
But so; and yesterday she told me she had only a hundred dollars left.
'Enough to last me through,' she said to me. Poor thing, she lifted up
her eyes with a way she has, as if looking 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.'