have not a long time to live."

"You should not have such ideas at your age. Have you been sick for a long
time?"

"It will soon be three months. Bless me! when I had to work for myself and
my child, I increased my labor; the winter was cold, I caught a cold on my
chest; at this time I lost my little girl. In watching her I forgot myself.
To that add sorrow, and I am what you see me, consumptive, doomed--as was
the actress who has just died."

"At your age there is always hope."

"The actress was only two years older, and you see---"

"She whom the good sisters are watching now, was she an actress?"

"Oh, yes--what a fate! She had been beautiful as the day. She had plenty of
money, equipages, diamonds, but, unfortunately, the small-pox disfigured
her; then want came, then poverty--behold her dead in the hospital. Yet,
she was not proud; on the contrary, she was kind and gentle to everybody;
she told us that she had written to a gentleman whom she had known in her
prosperity, who had loved her; she wrote to him to come and reclaim her
body, because it hurt her feelings to think she would be dissected--cut in
pieces."

"And this gentleman has come?"

"No."