After a long while she awakened, in a peaceful dawning, to hear nurses
cheerfully chatting, and the boy warmly fussing and grunting in his
basket. The little room was flooded with sunlight, sunlight bright on a
snowy world, and the young women who had been so casually indifferent
to another woman's agony were proudly awake to the charms of the baby.
The cocoon was lifted; Martie in a tremor of love and tenderness looked
down at the scowling, wrinkled little face.

Instantly terror for his safety, for his health, for his immortal soul
possessed her. She looked uneasily at Miss Everett, when that nurse
bore him away. Did the woman realize what motherhood MEANT? Did she
dream the value of that flannel bundle she was so jauntily carrying?

CHAPTER IV

Rain was falling in such sweeping sheets that the windows actually
shook under the onslaught; all day long a high wind had raged about the
house. Above the noise of the November storm in the warm basement
bedroom rose the steady click and purr of the sewing-machine and the
chattering of a child's voice, and from outside, on the pavement, was a
furious rushing of coal. The big van had been backed up against the
curb, and the cascading black torrent interrupted the passers-by.

"Heavens! Was there ever such an uproar!" exclaimed Martie, ceasing her
operations at the machine and leaning back in her chair with a long
sigh. The lengths of flimsy white curtaining she had been hemming
slipped to the floor; she put her hands behind her head, and yawned
luxuriously. The room was close, and even at four o'clock there was
need of lights; its other occupants were only two, the child who played
with the small gray and red stone blocks upon the floor, and the old
woman who was peering through her glasses at the curtaining that lay
across her lap, and manipulating it with knotted hands. Mrs. Curley was
"Nana" to little Teddy Bannister now, and this shabby room overlooking
a cemented area, and with its windows safeguarded by curved ornamental
iron bars from attack from the street, would be his first memory of
life.

But it was a comfortable room; once the dining room, it had been
changed and papered and carpeted for its present tenants when Martie,
as housekeeper of the boarding-house, had decided to move the dining
room into the big, useless rear parlour upstairs. She and Teddy had
privacy here; they had plenty of room, and the feet that crisped by on
the sidewalk, the noises