u're frightenin' her to death. Give her to
me this minute!"

Ellen, meanwhile, that little tender blossom tossed helplessly by
contending waves of love, was weeping and trembling with joy at the
feel of her mother's arms and with awe and terror at this tempest of
passion which she had evoked.

"Give her to me!" demanded Mrs. Zelotes Brewster.

The crowd who had followed stood gaping with working faces. The
mothers wept over their own children. Eva stood at her sister's
elbow, with a hand on one of the child's, which was laid over
Fanny's shoulder. Jim Tenny had his face hidden on his horse's neck.

"Give her to me!" said Mrs. Zelotes again. "Give her to me, I say! I
am her own grandmother!"

"And I am her own mother!" called out Fanny, with a great
master-note of love and triumph and defiance. "I'm her own mother,
and I've got her, and nobody but God shall take her from me again."
The tears streamed down her cheeks; she kissed the child with pale,
parted lips. She was at once pathetic and terrible. She was human
love and selfishness incarnate.

Mrs. Zelotes Brewster stared at her, and her face changed suddenly
and softened. She turned and went back into her own house. Her gray
head appeared a second beside her window, then sank out of sight.
She was kneeling there with her Bible at her side, a sudden sweet
humility of thankfulness rising from her whole spirit like a
perfume, when Fanny, with Eva following, still clinging to the
child's little hand over her sister's shoulder, went across the yard
to her own house to tell her husband. The others followed, and stood
about outside, listening with curiosity sanctified by intensest
sympathy. One nervous-faced boy leaped on the slant of the bulkhead
to peer in a window of the sitting-room, and when his mother pulled
him back forcibly, rubbed his grimy little knuckles across his eyes,
and a dark smooch appeared on his nose and cheeks. He was a young
boy, very small and thin for his age. He whispered to his mother and
she nodded, and he darted off in the direction of his own home.

Andrew Brewster had just come home after an all-night's search, and
he was in his bedroom in the bitter sleep of utter exhaustion and
despair. Suddenly his heart had failed him and his brain had reeled.
He had begun to feel dazed, to forget for a minute what he was
looking for. He had made incoherent replies to the men with him, and
finally one, after a whispered consultation with the others,