The little one rattled the tin spoon around the sides of the cup. "Papa bye," she returned chasing a solitary crumb intently. "Yosie sick, mamma sick, Tante sick, but Angel, her ain't sick when she come way a way on--on--" a worried look flitted over the flushed little face, and she looked up at Norma expectantly as if expecting her to supply the missing word, "on,--Angel come way a way on--_vaisseau_--" at last with baby glee she brought the word forth triumphantly, "Papa bye and Angel and mamma and Tante and Yosie come way a way on _vaisseau_!" "You see," said Mary Carew, looking at Norma, and the others shook their heads sadly. Miss Bonkowski accepted the situation. "Though what a vasso is, or a tante either, is beyond me to say," she murmured. "But what is goin' to be done with her, then?" ventured little Mrs. Tomlin, holding her own baby closer as she spoke. There was a pause which nobody seemed to care to break, during which more than one of the women saw the child on Mary's knee through dim eyes which turned the golden hair into a halo of dazzling brightness. Then Norma got up and began to clear away the remains of breakfast and to clatter the crockery from stove and table together for washing, while Mary Carew, avoiding the others' glances, busied herself by awkwardly wiping the child's mouth and chin with a corner of her own faded cotton dress. Submitting as if the process was a matter of course, the baby gazed meanwhile into Mary's colorless, bony and unlovely face. Perhaps the childish eyes found something behind its hardness not visible to older and less divining insight, for one soft hand forthwith stole up to the hollow cheek, while the other pulled at the worn sleeve for attention. "What a name?" the clear little voice lisped inquiringly. Poor Mary looked embarrassed, but awkwardly lent herself to the caress as if, in spite of her shamefacedness, she found it not unpleasant. The baby's eyes regarded her with sad surprise. "A got no name, poor--poor--a got no name," then she broke forth, and as if quite overcome with the mournfulness of Mary's condition, the little head burrowed back into the hollow of the supporting arm, that she might the better gaze up and study the face of this object for pity and wonder. Poor Mary Carew--would that some one of the hundreds of un-mothered and unloved little ones in the great city had but found it out sooner--her starved heart had been hungering all her life, and now her arms closed about the child. "I reckon I'll keep her till somebody comes for her," she said with a kind of defiance, as if ashamed of her own weakness, "it'll only mean," with a grim touch of humor in her voice, "it'll only mean a few more jean pantaloons a week to make any how." "We'll share her keep between us alike, Mary Carew," declared Norma, haughtily, with a real, not an affected toss, of the frizzed head now, "what is your charge, is mine too, I'd have you know!"