There might have been something in the little convent girl's face,
had his eye been more sensitive--trifle paler, maybe, the lips a
little tighter drawn, the blue ribbon a shade faded. He may have
noticed that, but-- And the visit of "How d' ye do" came to an end.
They walked down the stairway, the woman in front, the little convent
girl--her hand released to shake hands with the captain--following,
across the bared deck, out to the gangway, over to the middle of
it. No one was looking, no one saw more than a flutter of white
petticoats, a show of white stockings, as the little convent girl went
under the water.
The roustabout dived, as the roustabouts always do, after the
drowning, even at the risk of their good-for-nothing lives. The mate
himself jumped overboard; but she had gone down in a whirlpool.
Perhaps, as the pilot had told her whirlpools always did, it may have
carried her through to the underground river, to that vast, hidden,
dark Mississippi that flows beneath the one we see; for her body was
never found.
GRANDMOTHER'S GRANDMOTHER
As the grandmother related it fresh from the primeval sources that
feed a grandmother's memory, it happened thus:
In the early days of the settlement of Georgia--ah, how green and
rustic appears to us now the world in the early days of the settlement
of Georgia! Sometimes to women, listening to the stories of their
grandmothers, it seems better to have lived then than now--her
grandmother was at that time a young wife.
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