sniffed like a hunting hound. "She
didn't say not to go into Mrs. Mann's," said she.

"She said anywhere; I heard her tell you," said Maria.

"Mrs. Mann's ain't anywhere," said Josephine, who had a will of her
own. She rushed around and caught up the baby. "She's most froze,"
said she. "She'll get the croup if she don't get warmed up."

With that, Josephine carrying the baby, Maria, Gladys, and Mrs. Mann
all entered the little, squalid Mann house, as hot as a conservatory
and reeking with the smell of boiled molasses.

When Josephine and Maria and the baby started out again, Maria turned
to Josephine.

"Now," said she, "if you don't let me push her as far as the corner
of our street, I'll tell how you took her into Mrs. Mann's. You know
what She'll say."

Josephine, whose face was smeared with molasses candy, and who was
even then sucking some, relinquished her hold on the carriage.
"You'll be awful mean if you do tell," said she.

"I will tell if you don't do what you say you'll do another time,"
said she.

When they reached home, Ida had not returned, but she came in radiant
some few minutes later. She had read a paper on a famous man, for the
pleasure and profit of the Edgham Woman's Club, and she had received
much applause and felt correspondingly elated. Josephine had taken
the baby up-stairs to a little room which had recently been fitted up
for a nursery, and, not following her usual custom, Ida went in there
after removing her outer wraps. She stood in her blue cloth dress
looking at the child with her usual air of radiant aloofness, seeming
to shed her own glory, like a star, upon the baby, rather than
receive its little light into the loving recesses of her own soul.
Josephine and also Maria were in a state of consternation. They had
discovered a large, sticky splash of molasses candy on the baby's
white embroidered cloak. They had washed the baby's sticky little
face, but they did not know what was to be done about the cloak,
which lay over a chair. Josephine essayed, with a dexterous gesture,
to so fold the cloak over that the stain would be for the time
concealed. But Ida Edgham had not been a school-teacher for nothing.
She saw the gesture, and immediately took up the cloak herself.

"Why, what is this on her cloak?" said she.

There was a miserable silence.

"It looks like molasses candy. It is molasses candy," said Ida.
"Josephine, did you give this child molasses candy?" Ida's voice was