the child out somewhere, if it lived.
Sometimes they didn't live.

But if they arrested Louis, Lily Cardew would fling him aside like an
old shoe.

She closed her eyes. That opened a vista of possibilities she would not
face.

She stopped in her mother's room on her slow progress upstairs, moved
to sudden pity for the frail life now wearing to its close. If that
were life she did not want it, with its drab days and futile effort, its
incessant deprivations, its hands, gnarled with work that got nowhere,
its greatest blessing sleep and forgetfulness.

She wondered why her mother did not want to die, to get away.

"I'll soon be able to look after you a bit, mother," she said from the
doorway. "How's the pain down your arm?"

"Bring me the mucilage, Edie," requested Mrs. Boyd. She was propped up
in bed and surrounded by newspapers. "I've found Willy's name again.
I've got fourteen now. Where's the scissors?"

Eternity was such a long time. Did she know? Could she know, and still
sit among her pillows, snipping?

"I wonder," said Mrs. Boyd, "did anybody feed Jinx? That Ellen is so
saving that she grudges him a bone."

"He looks all right," said Edith, and went on up to bed. Maybe the Lord
did that for people, when they reached a certain point. Maybe He took
away the fear of death, by showing after years of it that life was not
so valuable after all. She remembered her own facing of eternity, and
her dread of what lay beyond. She had prayed first, because she wanted
to have some place on the other side. She had prayed to be received
young and whole and without child. And her mother--

Then she had a flash of intuition. There was something greater than
life, and that was love. Her mother was upheld by love. That was what
the eternal cutting and pasting meant. She was lavishing all the love
of her starved days on Willy Cameron; she was facing death, because his
hand was close by to hold to.

For just a moment, sitting on the edge of her bed, Edith Boyd saw what
love might be, and might do. She held out both hands in the darkness,
but no strong and friendly clasp caught them close. If she could only
have him to cling to, to steady her wavering feet along the gray path
that stretched ahead, years and years of it. Youth. Middle age. Old age.

"I'd only drag him down," she muttered bitterly.

Willy Cameron, meanwhile, had gone to Mr. Hendricks with Edith's story,
and together late that evening they saw the Chief o