"_Does he get him?_" The agonized whisper broke the stillness that fell upon the court-room as the decision was announced. They took her home more dead than alive. "It isn't a foregone conclusion that he will get him yet, my child," Judge Kirtley told her as he helped her into the house. "This is but the beginning. You are not going to give up at the very outset, are you? Keep up your courage, Margaret! You think you don't care to have Mrs. Kirtley with you to-night? Well, I'll send the doctor in to give you something for your nerves. You are all unstrung. There! there! Here, Auntie," as Mammy Cely appeared, "take her and put her to bed. This has been hard on her." When the old woman followed him to the door he said, "No. It went against her. I am afraid I buoyed her up a little too much. This is the reaction. Look after her." In her darkened room Margaret lay on the couch and tried to think it out. But her head buzzed so and she was so frightfully confused! After a while maybe she could, but not now--not now! When she went to bed she fell into fitful sleep. Her dreams were worse than her waking fears. She put out her hand every now and then to touch Philip and be sure he was actually there. As she tossed thus on a sleepless bed, now burning with fever, now shaking as with an ague, Mammy Cely's words suddenly recurred to her with startling distinctness. "If I had been a white woman I would have taken that child and gone." ... Well?... _She_ was a white woman.... She lay very still then. But where could she go?... In all the world where could she go? A curious thing is the human brain. It has its crannies and cubby-holes where it lays away its stores as a housewife piles up unused linen. Then these treasures are covered up by other and later accumulations and we straightway forget that they exist, until some day Memory without ado deftly extricates from underneath the load a name, a fact, a story, and holds it up before us; or, opening but a crack, she bids us listen at the door, and we hear perhaps as Margaret was hearing now, a forgotten voice, saying: "--an obscure spot, my dear. You can hardly find it on the map. But if you ever need a friend, come to me." Her trembling ceased. Her heart was almost brought to a stop by the sudden force of a hope that flung itself across her way. For steadying the nerves of an essentially strong person suffering temporary collapse, there is nothing like an emergency requiring action. It is the helplessness of enforced inactivity that saps courage and bears us down. As Margaret lay there holding with a death-grip to her new-found hope, she felt herself thrilled as by an electric current. Strength and courage came flowing back to the heart that a moment before had been at ebb-tide. She thought rapidly. Then she got up and looked at the clock. It was not quite twelve. She had thought it was nearly morning.