“I won’t take him,” she said flatly; “if I do, nobody’ll take him away. It’s the same with a baby as it is with a stray kitten, once you take it you keep it. I ain’t goin’ to take Jean Bartlett’s brat.” “Don’t!” snapped the doctor, “for of such is the kingdom of heaven!” Then he went out, turning his collar up again to his ears. “I’m going for the undertaker, Caleb.” They stopped as he spoke and looked down at Jean’s boy. He lay with his arm across his face; he had not been undressed and one foot hung pendent in a forlorn and heelless shoe. “The end of the drama,” commented the doctor dryly, “the sufferer.” Caleb stooped down and gently lifted the sleeping child; he wrapped the old quilt about him, and bore him to the door. The doctor followed, then he reached over and put his hand on the latch. “What are you doing?” he asked sharply. “I’ve taken him,” said Trench calmly; “open the door.” “You’ve no one to care for him.” Dr. Cheyney eyed him keenly. “No,” he replied; “so much the better, the place is lonely.” “You know what they’ll say?” The young man’s face stiffened. “What?” “That he’s your child,” said the doctor. “Open the door,” said Caleb Trench. The doctor opened it, then Trench stood straight, Sammy’s tousled head on his shoulder. “Dr. Cheyney,” he said sternly, “if every stone in Paradise Ridge rose up to accuse me, I’d still do as I pleased.” William Cheyney smiled grimly. “I believe you would,” he said, “but let me tell you, Caleb, you’ve got your fate by the forelock now!” Yet he helped Trench put the sleeping child into the carriage, and as they did it a new sound gurgled into the night, the voice of the tippler in the attic, who had been shut up there alone and frightened, but was sipping and sipping to keep up his spirits. Now he sang, one kind of spirits rising as the other kind went down. And the song that followed them through the night, as they drove away from the house of death, with the nameless child between them, was “After the Ball.” “The Lord forgive us!” said the doctor musingly; “it’s ‘after the ball’ with most of us, and then the straight house! G’long with you, Henk!” XIV JUNIPER’S spouse, Aunt Charity, was in the habit of sweeping out Caleb’s office and washing his windows, and the morning after Jean Bartlett’s death was her morning for scouring the premises. She was a stout old woman, nearly black, with a high pompadour, the arms and shoulders of a stonemason, and “a mighty misery” in her side. She stopped five times in the course of sweeping the inner office and stood, leaning on her broom, to survey the bundle of indiscriminate clothes on the floor, which was Sammy.