"Mind her back," said Rose, remembering instructions. After her first glance Claribel had not looked at the child. But now, in its father's arms, it began to whimper. The mother stirred uneasily, and frowned. "Take it away!" she ordered. "I told them not to bring it here." The child cried louder. Its tiny red face, under the powder, turned purple. It beat the air with its fists. Al, still holding it in his outstretched arms, began vague motions to comfort it, swinging it up and down and across. But it cried on, drawing up its tiny knees in spasms of distress. Claribel put her fingers in her ears. "You'll have to feed it!" Rose shouted over the din. The girl comprehended without hearing, and shook her head in sullen obstinacy. "What do you think of that for noise?" said Al, not without pride. "She's like me, all right. When I'm hungry, there's hell to pay if I'm not fed quick. Here,"--he bent down over Claribel,--"you might as well have dinner now, and stop the row." Not ungently, he placed the squirming mass in the baptismal dress beside the girl on the bed. With the instinct of ages, the baby stopped wailing and opened her mouth. "The little cuss!" cried Al, delighted. "Ain't that me all over? Little angel-face the minute I get to the table!" Unresisting now, Claribel let Rose uncover her firm white breast. The mother's arm, passively extended by Rose to receive the small body, contracted around it unconsciously. She turned and looked long at the nuzzling, eager mouth, at the red hand lying trustfully open on her breast, at the wrinkled face, the indeterminate nose, the throbbing fontanelle where the little life was already beating so hard. "A girl, Rose!" she said. "My God, what am I going to do with her?" Rose was not listening. The Junior Medical's turn had come at last. Downstairs in the chapel, he was standing by the organ, his head thrown back, his heavy brown hair (which would never stay parted without the persuasion of brilliantine) bristling with earnestness. "_O'er all the way, green palms and blossoms gay_," he sang, and his clear tenor came welling up the staircase to Liz, and past her to the ward, and to the group behind the screen. "_Are strewn this day in festal preparation, Where Jesus comes to wipe our tears away-- E'en now the throng to welcome Him prepare._" On the throne-chair by the record-table, the Nurse sat and listened. And because it was Easter and she was very happy and because of the thrill in the tenor voice that came up the stairs to her, and because of the page in the order-book about bran baths and the rest of it, she cried a little, surreptitiously, and let the tears drop down on a yellow hospital record. The song was almost done. Liz, on the stairs, had fed her baby twenty minutes too soon, and now it lay, sleeping and sated, in her lap. Liz sat there, brooding over it, and the last line of the song came up the staircase.