m pain, in the child in their arms, in present peace and
security. She could not understand.

She herself felt no sense of loss. Having never held her child in her
arms she did not feel them empty.

She had not been told of her mother's death; men were not admitted to
the ward, but early on that first morning, when she lay there, hardly
conscious but in an ecstasy of relief from pain, Ellen had come. A tired
Ellen with circles around her eyes, and a bag of oranges in her arms.

"How do you feel?" she had asked, sitting down self-consciously beside
the bed. The ward had its eyes on her.

"I'm weak, but I'm all right. Last night was awful, Ellen."

She had roused herself with an effort. Ellen reminded her of something,
something that had to do with Willy Cameron. Then she remembered, and
tried to raise herself in the bed.

"Willy!" she gasped. "Did he come home? Is he all right?"

"He's all right. It was him that found you were here. You lie back now;
the nurse is looking."

Edith lay down and closed her eyes, and the ecstasy of relief and peace
gave to her pale face an almost spiritual look. Ellen saw it, and patted
her arm with a roughened hand.

"You poor thing!" she said. "I've been as mean to you as I knew how to
be. I'm going to be different, Edith. I'm just a cross old maid, and I
guess I didn't understand."

"You've been all right," Edith said.

Ellen kissed her when she went away.

So for three days Edith lay and rested. She felt that God had been very
good to her, and she began to think of God as having given her another
chance. This time He had let her off, but He had given her a warning.
He had said, in effect, that if she lived straight and thought straight
from now on He would forget this thing she had done. But if she did
not--

Then what about Willy Cameron? Did He mean her to hold him to that now?
Willy did not love her. Perhaps he would grow to love her, but she was
seeing things more clearly than she had before, and one of the things
she saw was that Willy Cameron was a one-woman man, and that she was not
the woman.

"But I love him so," she would cry to herself.

The ward moved in its orderly routine around her. The babies were
carried out, bathed and brought back, their nuzzling mouths open for
the waiting mother-breast. The nurses moved about, efficient, kindly,
whimsically maternal. Women went out when their hour came, swollen
of feature and figure, and were wheeled back later on,