struck him then, even as the red spot on her cheek deepened, and he held out his arms for the child.
"Let me carry 'im for you, ma'm. Is it a boy?"
But her arms closed tighter about her baby. "He is my little son." It was almost a cry, as she said it, but again she forced herself to calmness, and, walking slowly out, added, with a quiet smile: "I always keep him myself. We do in America."
In a moment she was gone. The warm sunlight burst in on them and flooded the cold hall as the old man stood in the doorway looking after the retreating cab, and down at the silver shilling.
Darker, dingier, stuffier, seemed the box of a room, as she walked into it and laid her still sleeping babe on the bed. She felt herself moving in an unreal world. David—her David—she had not come to him after all; she had come to an empty place. She knelt and threw her arms about her little son, encircling his head and his feet. She neither wept nor prayed; and the red spot burned against the creamy whiteness of her skin. She was not thinking, only looking, seeing into the past and down the long vista of her future.
Pictures came to her—pictures of her girlhood—her dim aspirations—her melancholy-eyed father—his hilltop—and beloved, sunlit mountains. In the radiance of the spring, she saw them, and in the glory of the autumn; she breathed the fragrance of the pines in winter and heard the soft patter of summer rains on widespreading leaves. She saw David walking