lifted up with careful slowness
the tiny creature that wailed in it. Beside her, as he supported
himself anxiously on his elbow, the broad chest and shoulders of her
young husband rose above the screening footboard. The mother gazed
hungrily at the doll-like, writhing object, passed her hand over its
downy forehead, smiled with relief into its opening eyes, and gave
it her breast.

Instantly the wail ceased. A slow, placid smile--and yet, not quite
a smile--it was rather an elemental content, a gratified drifting
into the warm current of the stream of this world's being--spread
over the woman's face; the man's long arm wrapped around his
wealth, at once protecting and defiant; his head flung back against
the world, while his eyes studied humbly the mystery that he
grasped. The night lamp behind them threw a halo around the mother
and her child, and the great trinity of all times and all faiths
gleamed immortal upon the canvas of the simple room--its only
spectator a child.

In her, malleable to all the influences of the revealing night,
fairly disembodied, in her detached and flitting presence, the scene
woke dim, coiled memories of an infancy that stirred and pained her
even as it left her forever, and frightened longing for the
motherhood that life was holding for her. No longer an infant, not
yet a woman, this creature that was both felt the helplessness of
one, the yearning of the other, and as she pressed the nestling cat
tightly to her little breast two great, eager tears slipped down her
hot cheeks, and a gulping sob, half loneliness, half pure
excitement, broke into the gentle stillness of the lighted room.

"Who's there?"

The man's voice rang like a sudden pistol shot in the night; before
Caroline's fascinated gaze the gleaming, softly colored picture
faded and vanished into the engulfing darkness, as the lamp went out
and a dark, scudding mackerel cloud flew over the moon.
Instinctively she fled softly down the knoll, instinctively she
dropped behind a bush at the bottom. She heard the rattle of the
window pane as the man pushed himself half out of the window; she
heard him call back to the waiting room behind him!

"It's a cat, dear--I saw it, plain. It's pretty bright out here. But
I thought I saw something white beside it, too. I guess I'll take a
look around outside."

There was a sound of movement behind the window, and, caught in an
ecstasy of terror, Caroline turned at right angles from the fi