“I hope nurse will not be long,” she murmured, beginning to walk restlessly up and down the floor. “Of course, I am not exactly afraid, but it seems so very still and lonely, and--I miss Norman so very much. I wonder how far he is on his way by now? It is just seven hours and a half since he went. Baby, baby, I wish you would wake up and talk to me! Of course, you couldn’t say anything but papa and mamma and gee-gee and boo, but even that would be cheering now.” She leaned over the foot of the crib and pinched one of Alan’s soft, rosy toes, eager for him to wake, and even scream if he chose. “I certainly am not afraid, but I feel foolishly nervous and blue. I wish nurse would hurry. What can that dying woman want with mother? Ugh! it makes one shiver to think of death in this great, lonely house; but there is nothing to harm one here--nothing.” Yet she grew pale as a mouse nibbled behind the wainscot, and cried out: “Oh, how can Alan sleep so when I pull his toes so hard? Can it be that Mary dosed him with paregoric to make him rest while she was gone? Oh, I almost wish he would wake and scream with the colic! It would be better than this.” But Alan only kicked when she pinched his toes, and slept on more soundly than ever, confirming her in her theory of the paregoric. “I’ll discharge her to-morrow,” Thea thought, indignantly, throwing herself into a chair. “Oh, I won’t be so nervous and silly,” she went on, vexedly. “I know there’s nothing to make cold chills run down my back this way. I’ll think about something pleasant--about Norman. I’ll compose some poetry on his absence.” She flung herself into a chair at a little table where there was a pencil and a pad of writing-paper, and putting her golden head on one side with a pretty, bird-like motion, began to think in rhyme: “’Tis midnight, my darling--the house is so lonely.” “If it is not midnight, it might almost be, it is so dismal,” soliloquized Thea, with a sigh, as she jotted down the first line and proceeded: “All, all are asleep but me. I waken to weep--” “That is not very accurate, as I have not been asleep yet, but it is poetical license,” murmured Thea, as she scribbled some more words: --“Ah, beloved, if only, If only I were with thee!” The tears rushed to the blue eyes, and a smothered sob came from her throat, so passionately real was her aspiration. A moment’s pause, and the little pencil went on: “But the swift hours are bearing thee further away, The swift hours whose flight my poor heart can not stay! Come back to me, my darling, my eager heart cries, And the bitter tears rush from my heart to my eyes.” “The last four lines are true, anyhow,” sobbed Thea, forlornly. She laid her fair head down on the table a moment in silence, thinking surely it must be time for the nurse now, although barely fifteen minutes have elapsed since she had been left alone.