"Very well!" she concluded for the second time, "I’ll adopt a child, a man child! No girl things for me. I could not watch them straining out for their lives with the chance of losing them. A man can get what he wants and I’ll do my best, under God, to make him merciful." Toward morning Jo slept. The next day she cooked and planned as calmly as if she were arranging for an invited guest. All her excitement and fire were smothered, but she did not falter in her determination. She explained to Nick as she tossed scraps to him. Nick was obligingly broad in his appetite and tastes, bones and bits of dough were equally acceptable, and he patted the floor thankfully with his sturdy little tail whenever Jo remembered him. "We’ll take it as a sign, Nick," she said, "that what I’m trying to do is right if there is at St. Michael’s a man-thing, handsome and under a year old. We must have him handsome, that’s half of the battle, and he must be so young that he can’t remember. I want to begin on him. "Now I’ll bet you, Nick, that the Home is bristling with girl children and we’ll have none of them." Nick thumpingly agreed to all this but kept his eye on a plate of cookies that Mam’selle was lavishly sugaring. Nick did not spurn scraps but, like others, he yearned for tidbits. All day Jo worked, cooking and setting her house in order. Late in the afternoon she contemplated cutting a door between the two north chambers, her own and the one her father had used, which had never been occupied since. "The child will soon need a place of his own," mused Jo, already looking ahead as a real mother might have done. Suddenly she started, recalling for the first time since before Pierre Gavot’s diverting call her ambition concerning a boarder. "Well, the boarder will have to wait," she thought, "they hate babies, and boys are terribly noisy and messy. I’ll take a boarder when the lad goes away to school. I’ll need company then." By nightfall the little white house was spotless and in order. The fragrance of cooking mingled with the odour of wood fire was soothing to Jo’s tired nerves; it meant home and achievement. "I’ll not let on about the child," she concluded just before she went to sleep. "When the doors of St. Michael’s close on a child going in or out, they close, and that is the end of it. If folks care to pry it will give them something to do and keep them alive, but it’s little they’ll get from the Sisters or me. "I’m a fool, a big fool, but I can pay for my folly and that’s more than many women can do." Early on the following morning Jo set forth in her broad-bellied little cart in which were a hamper of goodies for the waifs of St. Michael’s, and a smaller basket containing Jo’s own midday meal. Jo, herself, sat on the shaft beside the fat Molly and bobbed along in the best of spirits. "You’re to watch the place, Nick," she commanded, "and if he returns, you know who, just save a nip of him for me, that’s a good beastie."