About this story
Before your father can finish demanding the truth, an officer arrives with a warrant charging her with concealing a birth and killing the child. Effie is carried off to the Tolbooth as neighbors gather, leaving you to decide, before morning, what question to ask her first.
How it opens
Effie returned to the cottage after a missing week, pale and too exhausted to explain where she had stayed.
Mrs SaddletreeYou have scarcely seen her since she entered my service in the Lawnmarket.
Do not call Father yet, Jeanie; let me breathe before he judges my face.
Father's evening labour will end soon, and his questions will leave me nowhere to hide.
Mrs SaddletreeShe left my shop with permission, but she did not spend that week under my roof.
The older woman had followed after hearing that Effie reached home dangerously ill.