his."

Edith was in the parlor. She had sat there almost all day, in an agony
of fear. At four o'clock the smallest Wilkinson had hammered at the
front door, and on being admitted had made a shameless demand.

"Bed and thugar," she had said, looking up with an ingratiating smile.

"You little beggar!"

"Bed and thugar."

Edith had got the bread and sugar, and, having lured the baby into
the parlor, had held her while she ate, receiving now and then an
exceedingly sticky kiss in payment. After a little the child's head
began to droop, and Edith drew the small head down onto her breast. She
sat there, rocking gently, while the chair slowly traveled, according to
its wont, about the room.

The child brought her comfort. She began to understand those grave
rocking figures in the hospital ward, women who sat, with eyes that
seemed to look into distant places, with a child's head on their
breasts.

After all, that was life for a woman. Love was only a part of the scheme
of life, a means to an end. And that end was the child.

For the first time she wished that her child had lived.

She felt no bitterness now, and no anger. He was dead. It was hard to
think of him as dead, who had been so vitally alive. She was sorry he
had had to die, but death was like love and children, it was a part of
some general scheme of things. Suppose this had been his child she was
holding? Would she so easily have forgiven him? She did not know.

Then she thought of Willy Cameron. The bitterness had strangely gone
out of that, too. Perhaps, vaguely, she began to realize that only young
love gives itself passionately and desperately, when there is no hope of
a return, and that the agonies of youth, although terrible enough, pass
with youth itself.

She felt very old.

Joe found her there, the chair displaying its usual tendency to climb
the chimney flue, and stood in the doorway, looking at her with haunted,
hungry eyes. There was a sort of despair in Joe those days, and now he
was tired and shaken from the battle.

"I'll take her home in a minute," he said, still with the strange eyes.

He came into the room, and suddenly he was kneeling beside the chair,
his head buried against the baby's warm, round body. His bent shoulders
shook, and Edith, still with the maternal impulse strong within her, put
her hand on his bowed head.

"Don't, Joe!"

He looked up.

"I loved you so, Edith!"

"Don't you love me now?"

"God knows I do.