For a long time she made no answer. Then her breath came with an unexpected gasp. "It wasn't your fault--I made you do it." For a moment more they were silent. Then she shifted the sleeping baby towards him. "Don't you want to kiss her?" she asked. He bent his face to the child with a sudden passionate tenderness. As he looked up, his wet eyes met Charlotte's, which were full of tears. She put out her hand to him. "I guess I've been hard on you," she said. ELIZABETH AND DAVIE BY MURIEL CAMPBELL DYAR When the town doctor, coming out to Turkey Ridge, had given as his verdict that Elizabeth's one chance of life--he could not say how slim the chance in that plain room, having within it the pleasant noise of bees and the spring sun on the floor--lay in her going to the great hospital in the city, it was Davie who fell to sobbing in his worn hands. "I'll jest die at home, Davie," she said in her quiet voice. "You'll take the money put away for our buryin' an' go, dearie!" Davie cried out fiercely. His gaunt frame, stooped as a scholar's, shook so pitifully with his grief, she had not the heart to gainsay him, but after she promised him it only shook the more. "Why, Davie," she chided, brightly, "ain't I always been a-wantin' to see the city streets with the hurryin' people, 'n' tall houses, 'n' churches with towers on 'em? They ain't many folks on th' Ridge'll hev sech a lettin'-out as mine." "If I only had 'nough saved to go too," he mourned. She answered him simply: "An' who'd I hev to write to me, with you goin' 'long? It'll seem terrible nice to hear from somebody. I always did love letters. Sence Cousin Tabby died I ain't had one." "You won't be afeard travellin' so far by yourself?" he asked then, awestruck. Davie had the diffidence of the untravelled. Few men ever left the small farming district of Turkey Ridge for a journey; but if one did so, and the trip were long, he had thereafter a bolder bearing. "Afeard?" She gave a little trembling laugh which would have deceived no one but a dull old man, now smitten suddenly by sorrow. "The idee o' my bein' afeard! They ain't a mite o' danger o' gettin' run over er lost er nothin'--not a mite." Under the pretext of bending to hunt for a lost pin she hid the sad fear in her eyes--a fear of all the greater world which was beyond Davie, from whom she had not been parted since her marriage.