t'll be better for the
baby if it does die! And there are others--" The door slammed upon his
angry back.

Rose-Marie's face was white as she leaned against the dark wainscoting.

"Minnie Cohen brought the baby in last week," she shuddered, "such a dear
baby! And Mrs. Celleni--she tried so hard! Oh, it's not right--" She was
crying, rather wildly, as she went out of the room.

The Superintendent, left alone at the table, rang for the stolid maid.
Her voice was carefully calm as she gave orders for the evening meal. If
she was thinking of Giovanni Celleni, his brute face filled with
semi-madness; if she was thinking of a burned baby, sobbing alone in a
darkened tenement while its mother breathlessly watched the gay colours
and shifting scenes of a make-believe life, her expression did not
mirror her thought. Only once she spoke, as she was folding her napkin,
and then--

"They're both very young," she murmured, a shade regretfully. Perhaps she
was remembering the enthusiasm--and the intolerance--of her own youth.

III

CONCERNING IDEALS

"Sunshine and apple blossoms!" Rose-Marie, hurrying along the hall to her
own room, repeated the Young Doctor's words and sobbed afresh as she
repeated them. She tried to tell herself that nothing he could think
mattered much to her, but there was a certain element of truth in
everything that he had said. It was a fact that her life had been an
unclouded, peaceful one--her days had followed each other as regularly,
as innocuously, as blue china beads, strung upon a white cord, follow
each other.

Of course, she told herself, she had never known a mother; and her father
had died when she was a tiny girl. But she was forced to admit--as she
had been forced to admit many times--that she did not particularly feel
the lack of parents. Her two aunts, that she had always lived with, had
been everything to her--they had indulged her, had made her pretty
frocks, had never tried, in any way, to block the reachings of her
personality. When she had decided suddenly, fired by the convincing
address of a visiting city missionary, to leave the small town of her
birth, they had put no obstacle in her path.

"If you feel that you must go," they had told her, "you must. Maybe it is
the work that the Lord has chosen for you. We have all faith in you,
Rose-Marie!"

And Rose-Marie, splendid in her youth and assurance, had never known that
their pillows were damp that night--and for many