asleep; I stole into the next room and
sat down with my face buried in my hands.

In a moment a light step aroused me. Aunt Ann stood before me, her pale
face all aglow with delight.

"O Helen my darling! She is so well. Thank God! thank God!" and she threw
her arms around me and burst into tears.

I felt like one turned to stone. Was I mad, or were they?

What had I seen in that one steady look of Annie's eyes? Was she really
well? I felt as if she had already died!

Agonizingly I waited to see Dr. Fearing's face. He came in before tea, saw
Annie for a few minutes, and came down-stairs rubbing his hands and
singing in a low tone.

"I never saw anything like that child's beautiful elasticity in my life,"
he said. "We shall have her dancing down-stairs in a month."

The cloud was utterly lifted from all hearts except mine. My aunt and
uncle looked at each other with swimming eyes. Edward tried to laugh and
look gay, but broke down utterly, and took refuge in the library, where I
found him lying on the floor, with his face buried in Annie's lounge.

I went home stupefied, bewildered. I could not sleep. A terror-stricken
instinct told me that all was not right. But how should I know more than
physician, mother, husband?

For ten days I saw my Annie every day for an hour. Her sweet, strange,
gentle, steady look into my eyes when we first met always paralyzed me
with fear, and yet I could not have told why. There was a fathomless
serenity in her face which seemed to me super-human. She said very
little. The doctor had forbidden her to talk. She slept the greater part
of the time, but never allowed the baby to be moved from her arms while
she was awake.

There was a divine ecstasy in her expression as she looked down into the
little face; it never seemed like human motherhood.

One day Edward came to me and said,--

"Do you think Annie is so well as they say? I suppose they must know; but
she looks to me as if she had died already, and it were only her glorified
angel-body that lies in that bed?"

I could not speak to him. I knew then that he had seen the same thing that
I had seen: if his strong, rather obtuse material nature had recognized
it, what could so blind her mother and father and the doctor? I burst into
tears and left him.

At the end of a week I saw a cloud on Dr. Fearing's face. As he left
Annie's room one morning, he stopped me and said abruptly,--

"What does Annie talk about?"

"She hardl