In the privacy of their own sitting-room, the two trained nurses confided to Mrs. Slawson: "It’s too bad the parents’ hearts are so set on the child. They’ll never raise it, _never_!" "Now, what do you think o’ that!" Martha said mournfully, and the two uniformed ones never knew that, in her heart, she despised them, "and their mizrable Bildadin’ talk, which nobody could stand up against it, anyhow, much less a innocent little lamb that hasn’t the stren’th to call’m liars to their faces." "O’ _course_ we’ll raise her," she assured Mr. Ronald confidently. "There’s no doubt about it. Yes, I know she ain’t very hefty, an’ she ain’t very robustic. But what do you expec’? You ain’t give her a fair show yet. You can’t take a baby, a few weeks old, ’specially if it had the tough time gettin’ in on the game at all, that this one had, an’ expec’ her to be as big an’ husky as my Sabina. It wouldn’t be sensible. Besides, look at her mother! Miss Claire’s no giantess, nor ever was, but she’s as sound as a nut, an’ so’ll the baby be, when she gets her gait on, an’ knows it’s up to her to keep in step with the percession. Don’t you let nobody discourage you. Believin’s half the battle. You can take it from me, that baby’s goin’ to live, an’ thrive, like the little thorabred she is. _She_ wouldn’t give us all this trouble for nothin’." Her invincible confidence was like a tonic to Francis Ronald. It reinforced his own more flickering faith, so he could meet Claire’s hungrily questioning eyes with reassurance. And, as the weeks went by, Martha’s prediction seemed less and less preposterous. "Didn’t I _tell_ you?" she exulted. "That baby’s a winner! She’s goin’ to be standard weight, all right, all right, an’ measure up to requirements too, give her time. But between you an’ me, all this new-fangled business with scales, an’ tape-measures, an’ suchlike, is enough to discourage the best-intentioned infant. There’s more notions, nowadays, than you can shake a stick at—an’ I’d like to shake a stick at most of’m, believe _me_!" At the time, she was thinking rather more of Miss Crewe, than of the nurses, whose "queer fandangoes" she never could become reconciled to. She was frankly anxious about Katherine.