Hetty listened breathlessly, her blue eyes opening wide, and her cheeks growing red. She did not speak. Mrs. Little misinterpreted her silence. "If you didn't want the baby here, I'd take it," she said almost beseechingly, "if Sally'd let me: it would break Jim's heart if they should have to leave here." "Not want the baby!" shouted Hetty, in a voice which reached Sally in the garden, and made her look up, thinking she was called. "I should think you must be crazy, Mrs. Little;" and, with the involuntary words, there entered for the first time into her mind a wonder whether Mrs. Little's whole treatment of her son and his wife were not so monstrous as to warrant a doubt as to her sanity. "Not want the baby! Why I'd give half the farm to have a baby running about here. How could Sally help knowing I'd be glad?" and Hetty moved swiftly towards the door, to go and seek Sally. Recollecting herself suddenly, she turned, and, halting on the threshold, said in her hardest tone: "Is there any thing else you wish to say?" There was ignominious dismissal in her tone, her look, her attitude; and Mrs. Little said hastily: "Oh, no, nothing, nothing! I only want to tell you that I'd like to thank you, though, for all your kindness to Jim;" and Mrs. Little's lips quivered, and the tears came into her eyes. Hetty was unmoved by them. "I think more of Sally than I do of Jim," she said severely. "It's all owing to Sally that he's got a chance to hold up his head again. Good morning, Mrs. Little;" and Hetty walked out of one door, leaving her guest to make her own way out of the other. Sally found it hard to believe in Hetty's readiness to welcome her baby. "Oh! you don't know, Hetty, how it will set everybody to talking again," said the poor girl. "You are so different from other folks. You can't understand. I don't suppose my children ever would be allowed to play with other children, do you?" she asked mournfully. "That was one thing which comforted me when my baby died. I thought she wouldn't live to have anybody despise her because she had had me for a mother. Somehow it don't seem fair, does it, Hetty, to have people punished for what their parents do? But the minister over at the Corners, that used to come and see me, he said that was what it meant in the Bible, where it said: 'Unto the third and fourth generation.' But I can't think it's so bad as that. You don't believe, Hetty, do you, that if I should have several children, and they should be married, that their grandchildren would ever hear any thing about me, how wicked I had been: do you, Hetty?" "No, indeed, child!" said Hetty sharply, feeling as if she should cry. "Of course I don't believe any such thing; and, if I did, I wouldn't worry over it. Why, I don't even know my great-grandmother's name," she laughed, "much less whether she were good or bad."