ust not think the child
hers. She turned toward Teola again, and seemed about to open her lips,
when the expression upon the other girl's face stayed her tongue. It was
a mixture of despair, illness and fright. Tessibel imagined she had
discovered beneath the pain-drawn face a desire to claim her own. Ah!
Teola would gather her babe, that tiny bit of shriveled flesh, into her
arms before the whole world. There rose in the squatter's heart a vast
respect for Myra Longman, who had taken her child from the beginning of
its tiny life, and defied the babbling tongues of the settlement
gossips. Teola Graves, although of a different class, was no less a
mother--she would do the same. Tessibel sat up, waiting for the
confession. Why was the minister's daughter so silent?--why so deathly
looking?

"I will be answered," insisted the student. Then, centering his eyes
full upon Tess, he added:

"Tessibel Skinner, _it_ is--yours!"

Teola's lips were pressed closely together. Spasms of pain drew them
down at the corners, making the girl resemble a woman twice her years.
With a sudden inspiration, she turned upon her brother.

"Frederick, Frederick," she stammered. "Don't blame her too much. She is
only a girl."

A cry escaped from the lips of Frederick; another followed from those of
Tess. The minister's daughter was throwing the motherhood of the babe
upon her. Teola had branded her squatter savior with a nameless child--a
horror from which the student shrank! She saw unbelief rise quickly in
his eyes, and saw him draw aside his long rain-coat as it almost touched
the box upon the floor. Shrinking disgust of the wriggling, whimpering
thing on the rags made Frederick involuntarily reach out his hand to his
sister, but his eyes were bent upon Tess.

"And you're the girl I've trusted!" he gasped, as Teola neared him
slowly. "Yours is the faith I've envied!--your life the one standard I
wish to gain!... God!" he groaned, "you--you--you the mother of that!"

His bitter tones stung her to the quick, whipping her into immediate
action. Fire gold-brown and swift as lightning swept into the flashing
eyes. Frederick's sister had thrust the child upon her. The secret was
dead between them. Tess remembered her oath--remembered her love for the
boy, and Teola's cowardice. Her despair gathered as her false position
was forced upon her.

She stooped, and grasped the babe in her hands with a passion that tore
the meager clothing from its