make me
live until I sign that paper, and make Henry Peters sign it, and send
Mr. Thomlins to you with it and the baby. I can do that, because I'm
going to!"

Ten days later she did exactly what she had said she would. Then she
turned her face to the wall and went into a convulsion out of which she
never came. While the Peters family refused Kate's plea to lay Polly
beside her grandmother, and laid her in their family lot, Kate, moaning
dumbly, sat clasping a tiny red girl in her arms. Adam drove to
Hartley to deposit one more paper, the most precious of all, in the
safety deposit box.

Kate and Adam mourned too deeply to talk about it. They went about
their daily rounds silently, each busy with regrets and self
investigations. They watched each other carefully, were kinder than
they ever had been to everyone they came in contact with; the baby they
frankly adored. Kate had reared her own children with small
misgivings, quite casually, in fact; but her heart was torn to the
depths about this baby. Life never would be even what it had been
before Polly left them, for into her going there entered an element of
self-reproach and continual self-condemnation. Adam felt that if he
had been less occupied with Milly York and had taken proper care of his
sister, he would not have lost her. Kate had less time for
recrimination, because she had the baby.

"Look for a good man to help you this summer, Adam," she said. "The
baby is full of poison which can be eliminated only slowly. If I don't
get it out before teething, I'll lose her, and then we never shall hear
the last from the Peters family." Adam consigned the Peters family to
a location he thought suitable for them on the instant. He spoke with
unusual bitterness, because he had heard that the Peters family were
telling that Polly had grieved herself to death, while his mother had
engineered a scheme whereby she had stolen the baby. Occasionally a
word drifted to Kate here and there, until she realized much of what
they were saying. At first she grieved too deeply to pay any
attention, but as the summer went on and the baby flourished and grew
fine and strong, and she had time in the garden, she began to feel
better; grief began to wear away, as it always does.

By midsummer the baby was in short clothes, sitting in a high chair,
which if Miss Baby only had known it, was a throne before which knelt
her two adoring subjects. Polly had said the baby would be