ead on the chair
tray, and putting her arms around the baby she laughed and cried at the
same time, while Miss Baby pulled her hair, patted her face, and
plastered it with wet, uncertain kisses. Then Kate tied a little
bonnet on the baby's head and taking her in her arms, she went to the
field to tell Adam. It seemed to Kate that she could see
responsibility slipping from his shoulders, could see him grow taller
as he listened. The breath of relief he drew was long and deep.

"Fine!" he cried. "Fine! I haven't told you HALF I knew. I've been
worried until I couldn't sleep."

Kate went back to the house so glad she did not realize she was
touching earth at all. She fed the baby and laid her down for her
morning nap, and then went out in the garden; but she was too restless
to work. She walked bareheaded in the sun and was glad as she never
before in her life had known how to be glad. The first thing Kate knew
she was standing at the gate looking up at the noonday sky and from the
depths of her heart she was crying aloud: "Praise ye the Lord, Oh my
soul. Let all that is within me praise His holy name!"

For the remainder of the day Kate was unblushingly insane. She started
to do a hundred things and abandoned all of them to go out and look up
at the sky and to cry repeatedly: "Praise the Lord!"

If she had been asked to explain why she did this, Kate could have
answered, and would have answered: "Because I FEEL like it!" She had
been taught no religion as a child, she had practised no formal mode of
worship as a woman. She had been straight, honest, and virtuous. She
had faced life and done with small question the work that she thought
fell to her hand. She had accepted joy, sorrow, shame, all in the same
stoic way. Always she had felt that there was a mighty force in the
universe that could as well be called God as any other name; it
mattered not about the name; it was a real force, and it was there.

That day Kate exulted. She carried the baby down to the brook in the
afternoon and almost shouted; she sang until she could have been heard
a mile. She kept straight on praising the Lord, because expression was
imperative, and that was the form of expression that seemed to come
naturally to her. Without giving a thought as to how, or why, she
followed her impulses and praised the Lord. The happier she grew, the
more clearly she saw how uneasy and frightened she had been.

When Nancy Ellen came,