ourt were
killing him. I wanted to finish some work I had to do, and then"----

She stopped; a scarlet flush broke over her neck and face.

"Yes, child?"

"God was very good to us,"--in an almost whisper. "Six months after my
husband left home, He gave us another child."

"You never told me this," cried Lufflin, aghast.

"I never told Jerome," quietly. "I put my baby out to nurse, where it
could breathe air, and not poison,--not far from here. I have left it
there since. May-be it was wrong," said poor Charlotte, hiding her face
in her hands, with a happy laugh. "It was a whim, I know. I may have
wronged him, but I had a fancy to give him his home and his child both
upon this Christmas day."

The Captain gasped, took a fresh bit of tobacco, but said nothing.

"There is no more to say,--but you want to see the baby?" suddenly.

"Certainly, Charlotte, certainly,--see the baby!" And the old Captain
followed her, glancing about him in a mild imbecility of astonishment.

"God bless my soul!" he broke out at last. "The idea of springing a
house and a baby on a man in one day! It assuredly is, child, the most
unprecedented whim"----

"Yes, yes,"--dodging suddenly into a room, and bringing out a bundle of
white linen and wool. She stood in the passage by a window, the red
evening light falling about her.

"It's a boy," she whispered, lifting off the covering. "He is very like
little Tom,"--an inexpressible awe on her face.

"Yes," said the Captain. He had meant to say a few sensible words to
bring her to reason about this matter; but, instead, he took up the
little white foot thrust out of the blanket and kissed it sheepishly,
looking askance at the woman's figure and face bent over the child,
beaming with a rare and tender beauty.

They said little after that. The mother stood playing with her baby,
touching its cheeks and chin until it laughed. She forgot Lufflin was
there, I suppose. Her soul seemed to be in her fingers, her pure passion
to envelop the mite of flesh as the weak sunshine did herself, and to
hold it in life. There was something in this wife-and-mother-love which
poor Lufflin did not understand.

"Well, well," he said, "I'll go now. God bless you, Lotty! You'll let me
have a share in this young fellow here, eh?"--and trotted down the back
stairs, leaving her in the narrow hall. "Old Mounchere Jacobus must have
been a good fellow," he thought, "to have deserved all this. God deals
so differently