ithing seconds ensued. Finally she heard the shrill answering whistle.

"Mr. Kelly, is Mrs. Brice at home, do you know? Or Mrs. Napthaly? This
is Mrs. Bannister... I'm ill. Will you get somebody?"

She broke off abruptly; catching the back of a chair. Kelly was a
grandfather ... he would understand. But if somebody didn't come pretty
soon...

It seemed hours; it was only minutes before the blessed sound of
waddling feet came to the bedroom door. Old Grandma Simons, Mrs.
Napthaly's mother, came in. Martie liked and Teddy loved the shapeless,
moustached old woman, who lived out obscure dim days in the flat below,
washing and dressing and feeding little black-eyed grandchildren.
Martie never saw her in anything but a baggy, spotted black
house-dress, but there were great gatherings and feasts occasionally
downstairs, and then presumably the adored old head of the family was
more suitably clad.

"Vell ... vot you try and do?" said Grandma Simons, grasping the
situation at once, and full of sympathy and approval.

"I don't know!" half-laughed, half-gasped Martie from the pillows. "I'm
awfully afraid my baby..." A spasm of pain brought her on one elbow, to
a raised position. "Oh, DON'T DO THAT!" she screamed.

"I do nothing!" said the old woman soothingly. And as Martie sank back
on the pillows, gasping and exhausted, yet with excited relief
brightening her face, Grandma Simons added triumphantly: "Now you shall
rest; you are a goot girl!"

A second later the thin cry with which the newborn catch the first
weary breath of an alien world floated through the room. Protesting,
raw, it fell on Martie's ears like the resolving chord of an exquisite
melody. Still breathless, still panting from strain and fright, she
smiled.

"Ah, the darling! Is he all right?" she whispered.

"You haf a girl!" the old woman interrupted her clucking and grumbling
to say briefly. "Vill you lay still, and let the old Grandma fix you,
or not vill you?" she added sternly. "Grandma who has het elefen of
dem...."

"Don't cry, little Margaret!" Martie murmured, happy under the kindly
adjusting old hands. The old woman stumped about composedly, opening
bureau drawers and scratching matches in the kitchen, before she would
condescend to telephone for the superfluous doctor. She was pouring a
flood of Yiddish endearments and diminutives about the newcomer, when
the surprised practitioner arrived. Mrs. Simons scouted the idea of a
nurse; she would