" he said to himself. "A mighty close squeak. I was
stepping round in a powder magazine, with every word a lit match."

In January she sank into a profound lassitude. Nothing interested her,
everything wearied her. As the time drew near, her mother came to stay
with her; and day after day the two women sat silent, Mrs. Gardiner
knitting, Pauline motionless, hands idle in her lap, mind vacant. If
she had any emotion, it was a hope that she would die and take her
child with her.

"That would settle everything, settle it right," she reflected, with
youth's morbid fondness for finalities.

When it was all over and she came out from under the opiate, she lay
for a while, open-eyed but unseeing, too inert to grope for the lost
thread of memory. She felt a stirring in the bed beside her, the
movement of some living thing. She looked and there, squeezed into the
edge of the pillow was a miniature head of a little old man--wrinkled,
copperish. Yet the face was fat--ludicrously fat. A painfully homely
face with tears running from the closed eyes, with an open mouth that
driveled and drooled.

"What is it?" she thought, looking with faint curiosity. "And why is
it here?"

Two small fists now rose aimlessly in the air above the face and
flapped about; and a very tempest of noise issued from the sagging
mouth.

"A baby," she reflected. Then memory came--"MY baby!"

She put her finger in the way of the wandering fists. First one of
them, then the other, awkwardly unclosed and as awkwardly closed upon
it. She smiled. The grip tightened and tightened and tightened until
she wondered how hands so small and new could cling so close and hard.
Then that electric clasp suddenly tightened about her heart. She burst
into tears and drew the child against her breast. The pulse of its
current of life was beating against her own--and she felt it. She
sobbed, laughed softly, sobbed again.

Her mother was bending anxiously over her.

"What's the matter, dearest?" she asked. "What do you wish?"

"Nothing!" Pauline was smiling through her tears. "Oh, mother, I am SO
happy!" she murmured.

And her happiness lasted with not a break, with hardly a pause, all
that spring and all that summer--or, so long as her baby's helplessness
absorbed the whole of her time and thought.

XI.

YOUNG AMERICA.

When Pierson, laggard as usual, returned to Battle Field a week after
the end of the long vacation, he found Scarborou