Tales of Men and Ghosts — 12 - The Letters, part ii

V

THE fresh spring sunshine which had so often attended Lizzie Weston her dusty climb up the hill of St. -Cloud beamed on her, some two years later, in a scene and a situation of altered import.

The horse-chestnuts of the Champs-Elysees filtered its rays through the symmetrical umbrage inclosing the graveled space about Daurent’s restaurant, and Miss West, seated at a table within that privileged circle, presented to the light a hat much better able to sustain its scrutiny than those which had sheltered the brow of Juliet Deering’s instructress.

Her dress was in keeping with the hat, and both belonged to a situation rich in such possibilities as the act of a leisurely luncheon at Daurent’s in the opening week of the Salon.

Her companions, of both sexes, confirmed and emphasized this impression by an elaborateness of garb and an ease of attitude implying the largest range of selection between the forms of Parisian idleness; and even Andora Macy, seated opposite, as in the place of co-hostess or companion, reflected, in coy grays and mauves, the festal note of the occasion.

This note reverberated persistently in the ears of a solitary gentleman straining for glimpses of the group from a table wedged in the remotest corner of the garden; but to Miss West herself the occurrence did not rise above the usual.

For nearly a year she had been acquiring the habit of such situations, and the act of offering a luncheon at Daurent’s to her cousins, the Harvey Mearses of Providence, and their friend Mr. Jackson Benn, produced in her no emotion beyond the languid glow which Mr. Benn’s presence was beginning to impart to such scenes.

“It’s frightful, the way you’ve got used to it,” Andora Macy had wailed in the first days of her friend’s transfigured fortune, when Lizzie West had waked one morning to find herself among the heirs of an old and miserly cousin whose testamentary dispositions had formed, since her earliest childhood, the subject of pleasantry and conjecture in her own improvident family.

Old Hezron Mears had never given any sign of life to the luckless Wests; had perhaps hardly been conscious of including them in the carefully drawn will which, following the old American convention, scrupulously divided his hoarded millions among his kin.

It was by a mere genealogical accident that Lizzie, falling just within the golden circle, found herself possessed of a pittance sufficient to release her from the prospect of a long gray future in Mme.

Clopin’s pension.

The release had seemed wonderful at first; yet she presently found that it had destroyed her former world without giving her anew one.

On the ruins of the old pension life bloomed the only flower that had ever sweetened her path; and beyond the sense of present ease, and the removal of anxiety for the future, her reconstructed existence blossomed with no compensating joys.

She had hoped great things from the opportunity to rest, to travel, to look about her, above all, in various artful feminine ways, to be “nice” to the companions of her less privileged state; but such widenings of scope left her, as it were, but the more conscious of the empty margin of personal life beyond them.

It was not till she woke to the leisure of her new days that she had the full sense of what was gone from them.

Their very emptiness made her strain to pack them with transient sensations: she was like the possessor of an unfurnished house, with random furniture and bric-a-brac perpetually pouring in “on approval.

” It was in this experimental character that Mr. Jackson Benn had fixed her attention, and the languid effort of her imagination to adjust him to her requirements was seconded by the fond complicity of Andora and the smiling approval of her cousins.

Lizzie did not discourage these demonstrations: she suffered serenely Andora’s allusions to Mr. Benn’s infatuation, and Mrs. Mears’s casual boast of his business standing.

All the better if they could drape his narrow square-shouldered frame and round unwinking countenance in the trailing mists of sentiment: Lizzie looked and listened, not unhopeful of the miracle.

“I never saw anything like the way these Frenchmen stare!

Doesn’t it make you nervous, Lizzie?

” Mrs. Mears broke out suddenly, ruffling her feather boa about an outraged bosom.

Mrs. Mears was still in that stage of development when her countrywomen taste to the full the peril of being exposed to the gaze of the licentious Gaul.

Lizzie roused herself from the contemplation of Mr. Benn’s round baby cheeks and the square blue jaw resting on his perpendicular collar.

“Is some one staring at me?

” she asked with a smile.

“Don’t turn round, whatever you do!

There--just over there, between the rhododendrons--the tall fair man alone at that table.

Really, Harvey, I think you ought to speak to the head-waiter, or something; though I suppose in one of these places they’d only laugh at you,” Mrs. Mears shudderingly concluded.

Her husband, as if inclining to this probability, continued the undisturbed dissection of his chicken wing; but Mr. Benn, perhaps aware that his situation demanded a more punctilious attitude, sternly revolved upon the parapet of his high collar in the direction of Mrs. Mears’s glance.

“What, that fellow all alone over there?

Why, _he’s_ not French; he’s an American,” he then proclaimed with a perceptible relaxing of the facial muscles.

“Oh!

” murmured Mrs. Mears, as perceptibly disappointed, and Mr. Benn continued carelessly: “He came over on the steamer with me.

He’s some kind of an artist--a fellow named Deering.

He was staring at _me_, I guess: wondering whether I was going to remember him.

Why, how d’ ‘e do?

How are you?

Why, yes, of course; with pleasure--my friends, Mrs. Harvey Mears--Mr. Mears; my friends Miss Macy and Miss West.

” “I have the pleasure of knowing Miss West,” said Vincent Deering with a smile.

VI

EVEN through his smile Lizzie had seen, in the first moment, how changed he was; and the impression of the change deepened to the point of pain when, a few days later, in reply to his brief note, she accorded him a private hour.

That the first sight of his writing--the first answer to his letters--should have come, after three long years, in the shape of this impersonal line, too curt to be called humble, yet confessing to a consciousness of the past by the studied avoidance of its language!

As she read, her mind flashed back over what she had dreamed his letters would be, over the exquisite answers she had composed above his name.

There was nothing exquisite in the conventional lines before her; but dormant nerves began to throb again at the mere touch of the paper he had touched, and she threw the little note into the fire before she dared to reply to it.

Now that he was actually before her again, he became, as usual, the one live spot in her consciousness.

Once more her tormented throbbing self sank back passive and numb, but now with all its power of suffering mysteriously transferred to the presence, so known, yet so unknown, at the opposite corner of her hearth.

She was still Lizzie West, and he was still Vincent Deering; but the Styx rolled between them, and she saw his face through its fog.

It was his face, really, rather than his words, that told her, as she furtively studied it, the tale of failure and slow discouragement which had so blurred its handsome lines.

She kept afterward no precise memory of the actual details of his narrative: the pain it evidently cost him to impart it was so much the sharpest fact in her new vision of him.

Confusedly, however, she gathered that on reaching America he had found his wife’s small property gravely impaired; and that, while lingering on to secure what remained of it, he had contrived to sell a picture or two, and had even known a brief moment of success, during which he received orders and set up a studio.

But inexplicably the tide had ebbed, his work remained on his hands, and a tedious illness, with its miserable sequel of debt, soon wiped out his small advantage.

There followed a period of eclipse, still more vaguely pictured, during which she was allowed to infer that he had tried his hand at divers means of livelihood, accepting employment from a fashionable house-decorator, designing wall-papers, illustrating magazine articles, and acting for a time, she dimly understood, as the social tout of a new hotel desirous of advertising its restaurant.

These disjointed facts were strung on a slender thread of personal allusions--references to friends who had been kind (jealously, she guessed them to be women), and to enemies who had darkly schemed against him.

But, true to his tradition of “correctness,” he carefully avoided the mention of names, and left her trembling conjectures to grope dimly through an alien crowded world in which there seemed little room for her small shy presence.

As she listened, her private pang was merged in the intolerable sense of his unhappiness.

Nothing he had said explained or excused his conduct to her; but he had suffered, he had been lonely, had been humiliated, and she suddenly felt, with a fierce maternal rage, that there was no conceivable justification for any scheme of things in which such facts were possible.

She could not have said why: she simply knew that it hurt too much to see him hurt.

Gradually it came to her that her unconsciousness of any personal grievance was due to her having so definitely determined her own future.

She was glad she had decided, as she now felt she had, to marry Jackson Benn, if only for the sense of detachment it gave her in dealing with the case of Vincent Deering.

Her personal safety insured her the requisite impartiality, and justified her in dwelling as long as she chose on the last lines of a chapter to which her own act had deliberately fixed the close.

Any lingering hesitations as to the finality of her decision were dispelled by the imminent need of making it known to Deering; and when her visitor paused in his reminiscences to say, with a sigh, “But many things have happened to you too,” his words did not so much evoke the sense of her altered fortunes as the image of the protector to whom she was about to intrust them.

“Yes, many things; it’s three years,” she answered.

Deering sat leaning forward, in his sad exiled elegance, his eyes gently bent on hers; and at his side she saw the solid form of Mr. Jackson Benn, with shoulders preternaturally squared by the cut of his tight black coat, and a tall shiny collar sustaining his baby cheeks and hard blue chin.

Then the vision faded as Deering began to speak.

“Three years,” he repeated, musingly taking up her words.

“I’ve so often wondered what they’d brought you.

” She lifted her head with a quick blush, and the terrified wish that he should not, at the cost of all his notions of correctness, lapse into the blunder of becoming “personal.

” “You’ve wondered?

” She smiled back bravely.

“Do you suppose I haven’t?

” His look dwelt on her.

“Yes, I daresay that _was_ what you thought of me.

” She had her answer pat--“Why, frankly, you know, I _didn’t_ think of you.

” But the mounting tide of her poor dishonored memories swept it indignantly away.

If it was his correctness to ignore, it could never be hers to disavow.

“_ Was_ that what you thought of me?

” she heard him repeat in a tone of sad insistence; and at that, with a quick lift of her head, she resolutely answered: “How could I know what to think?

I had no word from you.

” If she had expected, and perhaps almost hoped, that this answer would create a difficulty for him, the gaze of quiet fortitude with which he met it proved that she had underestimated his resources.

“No, you had no word.

I kept my vow,” he said.

“Your vow?

” “That you _shouldn’t_ have a word--not a syllable.

Oh, I kept it through everything!

” Lizzie’s heart was sounding in her ears the old confused rumor of the sea of life, but through it she desperately tried to distinguish the still small voice of reason.

“What _was_ your vow?

Why shouldn’t I have had a syllable from you?

” He sat motionless, still holding her with a look so gentle that it almost seemed forgiving.

Then abruptly he rose, and crossing the space between them, sat down in a chair at her side.

The deliberation of his movement might have implied a forgetfulness of changed conditions, and Lizzie, as if thus viewing it, drew slightly back; but he appeared not to notice her recoil, and his eyes, at last leaving her face, slowly and approvingly made the round of the small bright drawing-room.

“This is charming.

Yes, things _have_ changed for you,” he said.

A moment before she had prayed that he might be spared the error of a vain return upon the past.

It was as if all her retrospective tenderness, dreading to see him at such a disadvantage, rose up to protect him from it.

But his evasiveness exasperated her, and suddenly she felt the inconsistent desire to hold him fast, face to face with his own words.

Before she could reiterate her question, however, he had met her with another.

“You _did_ think of me, then?

Why are you afraid to tell me that you did?

” The unexpectedness of the challenge wrung an indignant cry from her.

“Didn’t my letters tell you so enough?

” “Ah, your letters!

” Keeping her gaze on his in a passion of unrelenting fixity, she could detect in him no confusion, not the least quiver of a sensitive nerve.

He only gazed back at her more sadly.

“They went everywhere with me--your letters,” he said.

“Yet you never answered them.

” At last the accusation trembled to her lips.

“Yet I never answered them.

” “Did you ever so much as read them, I wonder?

” All the demons of self-torture were up in her now, and she loosed them on him, as if to escape from their rage.

Deering hardly seemed to hear her question.

He merely shifted his attitude, leaning a little nearer to her, but without attempting, by the least gesture, to remind her of the privileges which such nearness had once implied.

“There were beautiful, wonderful things in them,” he said, smiling.

She felt herself stiffen under his smile.

“You’ve waited three years to tell me so!

” He looked at her with grave surprise.

“And do you resent my telling you even now?

” His parries were incredible.

They left her with a breathless sense of thrusting at emptiness, and a desperate, almost vindictive desire to drive him against the wall and pin him there.

“No. Only I wonder you should take the trouble to tell me, when at the time--” And now, with a sudden turn, he gave her the final surprise of meeting her squarely on her own ground.

“When at the time I didn’t?

But how _could_ I--at the time?

” “Why couldn’t you?

You’ve not yet told me?

” He gave her again his look of disarming patience.

“Do I need to?

Hasn’t my whole wretched story told you?

” “Told me why you never answered my letters?

” “Yes, since I could only answer them in one way--by protesting my love and my longing.

” There was a long pause of resigned expectancy on his part, on hers, of a wild confused reconstruction of her shattered past.

“You mean, then, that you didn’t write because--” “Because I found, when I reached America, that I was a pauper; that my wife’s money was gone, and that what I could earn--I’ve so little gift that way!

--was barely enough to keep Juliet clothed and educated.

It was as if an iron door had been suddenly locked and barred between us.

” Lizzie felt herself driven back, panting upon the last defenses of her incredulity.

“You might at least have told me--have explained.

Do you think I shouldn’t have understood?

” He did not hesitate.

“You would have understood.

It wasn’t that.

” “What was it then?

” she quavered.

“It’s wonderful you shouldn’t see!

Simply that I couldn’t write you _that_.

Anything else--not _that!

_” “And so you preferred to let me suffer?

” There was a shade of reproach in his eyes.

“I suffered too,” he said.

It was his first direct appeal to her compassion, and for a moment it nearly unsettled the delicate poise of her sympathies, and sent them trembling in the direction of scorn and irony.

But even as the impulse rose, it was stayed by another sensation.

Once again, as so often in the past, she became aware of a fact which, in his absence, she always failed to reckon with--the fact of the deep irreducible difference between his image in her mind and his actual self, the mysterious alteration in her judgment produced by the inflections of his voice, the look of his eyes, the whole complex pressure of his personality.

She had phrased it once self-reproachfully by saying to herself that she “never could remember him,” so completely did the sight of him supersede the counterfeit about which her fancy wove its perpetual wonders.

Bright and breathing as that counterfeit was, it became a gray figment of the mind at the touch of his presence; and on this occasion the immediate result was to cause her to feel his possible unhappiness with an intensity beside which her private injury paled.

“I suffered horribly,” he repeated, “and all the more that I couldn’t make a sign, couldn’t cry out my misery.

There was only one escape from it all--to hold my tongue, and pray that you might hate me.

” The blood rushed to Lizzie’s forehead.

“Hate you--you prayed that I might hate you?

” He rose from his seat, and moving closer, lifted her hand gently in his.

“Yes; because your letters showed me that, if you didn’t, you’d be unhappier still.

” Her hand lay motionless, with the warmth of his flowing through it, and her thoughts, too--her poor fluttering stormy thoughts--felt themselves suddenly penetrated by the same soft current of communion.

“And I meant to keep my resolve,” he went on, slowly releasing his clasp.

“I meant to keep it even after the random stream of things swept me back here in your way; but when I saw you the other day, I felt that what had been possible at a distance was impossible now that we were near each other.

How was it possible to see you and want you to hate me?

” He had moved away, but not to resume his seat.

He merely paused at a little distance, his hand resting on a chair-back, in the transient attitude that precedes departure.

Lizzie’s heart contracted.

He was going, then, and this was his farewell.

He was going, and she could find no word to detain him but the senseless stammer “I never hated you.

” He considered her with his faint grave smile.

“It’s not necessary, at any rate, that you should do so now.

Time and circumstances have made me so harmless--that’s exactly why I’ve dared to venture back.

And I wanted to tell you how I rejoice in your good fortune.

It’s the only obstacle between us that I can’t bring myself to wish away.

” Lizzie sat silent, spellbound, as she listened, by the sudden evocation of Mr. Jackson Benn.

He stood there again, between herself and Deering, perpendicular and reproachful, but less solid and sharply outlined than before, with a look in his small hard eyes that desperately wailed for reembodiment.

Deering was continuing his farewell speech.

“You’re rich now, you’re free.

You will marry.

” She vaguely saw him holding out his hand.

“It’s not true that I’m engaged!

” she broke out.

They were the last words she had meant to utter; they were hardly related to her conscious thoughts; but she felt her whole will suddenly gathered up in the irrepressible impulse to repudiate and fling away from her forever the spectral claim of Mr. Jackson Benn.

VII

IT was the firm conviction of Andora Macy that every object in the Vincent Deerings’ charming little house at Neuilly had been expressly designed for the Deerings’ son to play with.

The house was full of pretty things, some not obviously applicable to the purpose; but Miss Macy’s casuistry was equal tothe baby’s appetite, and the baby’s mother was no match for them in the art of defending her possessions.

There were moments, in fact, when Lizzie almost fell in with Andora’s summary division of her works of art into articles safe or unsafe for the baby to lick, or resisted it only to the extent of occasionally substituting some less precious or less perishable object for the particular fragility on which her son’s desire was fixed.

And it was with this intention that, on a certain fair spring morning--which wore the added luster of being the baby’s second birthday--she had murmured, with her mouth in his curls, and one hand holding a bit of Chelsea above his dangerous clutch: “Wouldn’t he rather have that beautiful shiny thing over there in Aunt Andorra’s hand?

” The two friends were together in Lizzie’s little morning-room--the room she had chosen, on acquiring the house, because, when she sat there, she could hear Deering’s step as he paced up and down before his easel in the studio she had built for him.

His step had been less regularly audible than she had hoped, for, after three years of wedded bliss, he had somehow failed to settle down to the great work which was to result from that privileged state; but even when she did not hear him she knew that he was there, above her head, stretched out on the old divan from Passy, and smoking endless cigarettes while he skimmed the morning papers; and the sense of his nearness had not yet lost its first keen edge of bliss.

Lizzie herself, on the day in question, was engaged in a more arduous task than the study of the morning’s news.

She had never unlearned the habit of orderly activity, and the trait she least understood in her husband’s character was his way of letting the loose ends of life hang as they would.

She had been disposed at first to ascribe this to the chronic incoherence of his first _menage;_ but now she knew that, though he basked under the rule of her beneficent hand, he would never feel any active impulse to further its work.

He liked to see things fall into place about him at a wave of her wand; but his enjoyment of her household magic in no way diminished his smiling irresponsibility, and it was with one of its least amiable consequences that his wife and her friend were now dealing.

Before them stood two travel-worn trunks and a distended portmanteau, which had shed their contents in heterogeneous heaps over Lizzie’s rosy carpet.

They represented the hostages left by her husband on his somewhat precipitate departure from a New York boarding-house, and indignantly redeemed by her on her learning, in a curt letter from his landlady, that the latter was not disposed to regard them as an equivalent for the arrears of Deering’s board.

Lizzie had not been shocked by the discovery that her husband had left America in debt.

She had too sad an acquaintance with the economic strain to see any humiliation in such accidents; but it offended her sense of order that he should not have liquidated his obligation in the three years since their marriage.

He took her remonstrance with his usual disarming grace, and left her to forward the liberating draft, though her delicacy had provided him with a bank-account which assured his personal independence.

Lizzie had discharged the duty without repugnance, since she knew that his delegating it to her was the result of his good-humored indolence and not of any design on her exchequer.

Deering was not dazzled by money; his altered fortunes had tempted him to no excesses: he was simply too lazy to draw the check, as he had been too lazy to remember the debt it canceled.

“No, dear!

No!

” Lizzie lifted the Chelsea figure higher.

“Can’t you find something for him, Andora, among that rubbish over there?

Where’s the beaded bag you had in your hand just now?

I don’t think it could hurt him to lick that.

” Miss Macy, bag in hand, rose from her knees, and stumbled through the slough of frayed garments and old studio properties.

Before the group of mother and son she fell into a raptured attitude.

“Do look at him reach for it, the tyrant!

Isn’t he just like the young Napoleon?

” Lizzie laughed and swung her son in air.

“Dangle it before him, Andora.

If you let him have it too quickly, he won’t care for it.

He’s just like any man, I think.

” Andora slowly lowered the shining bag till the heir of the Deerings closed his masterful fist upon it.

“There--my Chelsea’s safe!

” Lizzie smiled, setting her boy on the floor, and watching him stagger away with his booty.

Andora stood beside her, watching too.

“Have you any idea where that bag came from, Lizzie?

” Mrs. Deering, bent above a pile of dis-collared shirts, shook an inattentive head.

“I never saw such wicked washing!

There isn’t one that’s fit to mend.

The bag?

No; I’ve not the least idea.

” Andora surveyed her dramatically.

“Doesn’t it make you utterly miserable to think that some woman may have made it for him?

” Lizzie, bowed in anxious scrutiny above the shirts, broke into an unruffled laugh.

“Really, Andora, really--six, seven, nine; no, there isn’t even a dozen.

There isn’t a whole dozen of _anything_.

I don’t see how men live alone!

” Andora broodingly pursued her theme.

“Do you mean to tell me it doesn’t make you jealous to handle these things of his that other women may have given him?

” Lizzie shook her head again, and, straightening herself with a smile, tossed a bundle in her friend’s direction.

“No, it doesn’t make me the least bit jealous.

Here, count these socks for me, like a darling.

” Andora moaned, “Don’t you feel _anything at all?

_” as the socks landed in her hollow bosom; but Lizzie, intent upon her task, tranquilly continued to unfold and sort.

She felt a great deal as she did so, but her feelings were too deep and delicate for the simplifying process of speech.

She only knew that each article she drew from the trunks sent through her the long tremor of Deering’s touch.

It was part of her wonderful new life that everything belonging to him contained an infinitesimal fraction of himself--a fraction becoming visible in the warmth of her love as certain secret elements become visible in rare intensities of temperature.

And in the case of the objects before her, poor shabby witnesses of his days of failure, what they gave out acquired a special poignancy from its contrast to his present cherished state.

His shirts were all in round dozens now, and washed as carefully as old lace.

As for his socks, she knew the pattern of every pair, and would have liked to see the washerwoman who dared to mislay one, or bring it home with the colors “run”!

And in these homely tokens of his well-being she saw the symbol of what her tenderness had brought him.

He was safe in it, encompassed by it, morally and materially, and she defied the embattled powers of malice to reach him through the armor of her love.

Such feelings, however, were not communicable, even had one desired to express them: they were no more to be distinguished from the sense of life itself than bees from the lime-blossoms in which they murmur.

“Oh, do _look_ at him, Lizzie!

He’s found out how to open the bag!

” Lizzie lifted her head to smile a moment at her son, who sat throned on a heap of studio rubbish, with Andora before him on adoring knees.

She thought vaguely, “Poor Andora!

” and then resumed the discouraged inspection of a buttonless white waistcoat.

The next sound she was aware of was a fluttered exclamation from her friend.

“Why, Lizzie, do you know what he used the bag for?

To keep your letters in!

” Lizzie looked up more quickly.

She was aware that Andora’s pronoun had changed its object, and was now applied to Deering.

And it struck her as odd, and slightly disagreeable, that a letter of hers should be found among the rubbish abandoned in her husband’s New York lodgings.

“How funny!

Give it to me, please.

” “Give the bag to Aunt Andora, darling!

Here--look inside, and see what else a big big boy can find there!

Yes, here’s another!

Why, why--” Lizzie rose with a shade of impatience and crossed the floor to the romping group beside the other trunk.

“What is it?

Give me the letters, please.

” As she spoke, she suddenly recalled the day when, in Mme.

Clopin’s _pension_, she had addressed a similar behest to Andora Macy.

Andora had lifted a look of startled conjecture.

“Why, this one’s never been opened!

Do you suppose that awful woman could have kept it from him?

” Lizzie laughed.

Andora’s imaginings were really puerile.

“What awful woman?

His landlady?

Don’t be such a goose, Andora.

How can it have been kept back from him, when we’ve found it here among his things?

” “Yes; but then why was it never opened?

” Andora held out the letter, and Lizzie took it.

The writing was hers; the envelop bore the Passy postmark; and it was unopened.

She stood looking at it with a sudden sharp drop of the heart.

“Why, so are the others--all unopened!

” Andora threw out on a rising note; but Lizzie, stooping over, stretched out her hand.

“Give them to me, please.

” “Oh, Lizzie, Lizzie--” Andora, still on her knees, continued to hold back the packet, her pale face paler with anger and compassion.

“Lizzie, they’re the letters I used to post for you--_the letters he never answered!

_ Look!

” “Give them back to me, please.

” The two women faced each other, Andora kneeling, Lizzie motionless before her, the letters in her hand.

The blood had rushed to her face, humming in her ears, and forcing itself into the veins of her temples like hot lead.

Then it ebbed, and she felt cold and weak.

“It must have been some plot--some conspiracy!

” Andora cried, so fired by the ecstasy of invention that for the moment she seemed lost to all but the esthetic aspect of the case.

Lizzie turned away her eyes with an effort, and they rested on the boy, who sat at her feet placidly sucking the tassels of the bag.

His mother stooped and extracted them from his rosy mouth, which a cry of wrath immediately filled.

She lifted him in her arms, and for the first time no current of life ran from his body into hers.

He felt heavy and clumsy, like some one else’s child; and his screams annoyed her.

“Take him away, please, Andora.

” “Oh, Lizzie, Lizzie!

” Andora wailed.

Lizzie held out the child, and Andora, struggling to her feet, received him.

“I know just how you feel,” she gasped out above the baby’s head.