I'd better know.... It
isn't as if it would kill _me_ to have them, Mother--that wouldn't
matter! But it would kill them. It takes too long. Something is wrong
about me."

Kate glanced at Philip in shocked questioning. He nodded slightly.

"So now you know the sort God is, Mother! Cruel, cruel! Just because I
wasn't good.... Think of it, never any babies! No one to play with, and
pet, and take care of.... No one that needs me, or wants me...."

Philip bent over her, "My darling, the world is full of babies!"

"But not mine. Not one that wants _me_.--Oh, how my breast aches, how my
breast aches."

"This won't do," murmured Jemima, anxiously. "She's working herself up
into a fever again. I'm going to call the doctor."

Philip whispered something in her ear, and she hurried to the door.

There was a sound outside that stopped the frantic words on Jacqueline's
lips. "_What's that?_" she breathed. It came again; the fretful whimper
of a sleepy child.

Jemima came into the room, carrying small Kitty, newly awakened from a
nap on somebody's comfortable knees, and naturally resentful.

"O-oh!" gasped Jacqueline on a long-drawn breath. "_Give_ her to me!"

Presently, held warm against that aching breast, Mag's baby slept again;
and Jacqueline looked from one to the other of those about her with the
first dawning of her old, wide, radiant smile.

Soon her own eyes drooped. The three tiptoed toward the door; but quiet
as they were the faint voice from the bed followed them: "Phil, Phil!
where are you?"

"I can't leave her," he whispered apologetically. "You see how it is!"
(Kate was glad indeed to see how it was.) "Will you go into the next
room, and say good-by to--our son?"

CHAPTER LII

Kate stood gazing down at the grandchild she had so longed for,
Jacqueline's baby; an old, wrinkled, strangely wise little face, as
befitted one who had solved with his first breath both the mysteries of
Life and of Death. His tiny fists were clenched, his brow puckered, as
if that momentary glimpse of knowledge had not been a happy one.

No woman who has not gazed so into the face of her own dead child can
understand the hopelessness, the sense of bafflement, of the futility of
all human endeavor, which surged through Kate Kildare at that moment.
The waste of it! The utter, insensate waste of so much passion and hope
and tenderness, of such desperate agony, of such courage to bear...!
There is no spendthrift so prodiga