Family Pride

"You needn't go up," Katy said to the nurse, feeling that she would rather meet Marian without the presence of a stranger. "Miss Lennox will carry baby and you can wait here. It is not cold," she added, as the nurse showed signs of remonstrance, "and if it is, John can drive you around a square or two."

After this there was no further demur, and Katy soon stood with Helen at the door of Marian's room. She was at home, uttering an exclamation of astonishment when she saw who her visitors were, and turning white as ashes, when Katy, taking her baby from Helen's arms, placed it in her lap, saying, "You would not come to see it and so I brought it to you. Isn't she a beauty?"

There was a blur before Marian's eyes, a pressure about her heart which seemed congealing into stone, but she tried to stammer out something, bending over the tiny thing. Wilford Cameron's child, which she could not see for the thick blackness around her. Tears and bitter pangs of grief had the news of that child's birth wrung from Marian, bringing back all the dreadful past, and making her hear again as if it were but yesterday, the cold, decisive words: "If there were a child it would of course be different."

There was a child now, and it lay in Marian's lap, clad in the garments she had made, the cambric and the lace, the flannel and the merino, which nevertheless could not take from it that look of sickly infancy, or make it beautiful to others beside the mother. But it was Wilford's child, and so when for a moment both Helen and Katy turned to examine a rosebush just in bloom, Marian Hazleton hugged the little creature to her bosom, whispering over it a blessing which, coming from one so wronged, was doubly valuable. There was a tear, one of Marian's, on its face, when Katy came back to it, and there were more in Marian's eyes, falling like rain, as Katy asked, "What makes you cry?"

"I was thinking of what might have been," came struggling from Marian's pale lips, and Helen felt a throb of pain as she remembered Dr. Grant, and then thought of herself in connection with this sad "Might have been."

Marian, too, knew the full meaning of those words, as was attested by the gush of tears which dropped so fast on baby's face that Katy, alarmed for the safety of the crimson cloak wrapped around it for effect, took the child in her own arms, commencing that cooing conversation which shows how much young mothers love their first born. Marian's tears ceased at last, and after questioning Helen of Silverton and its people, she turned abruptly to Katy, still rocking and talking to her child, and asked: "What do you intend to call her?"