At that moment Wilford Cameron would have given half his fortune to have kept his child for Katy’s sake, but it was now too late; the carriage was at the door, and Mrs. Hubbell was waiting in the hall for the little procession filing down the stairs. Mrs. Cameron and Bell, Wilford and Katy, who carried the baby herself, her face bent over it and her tears still dropping like rain. But it was Wilford who took the baby to the carriage, going with it to the train and seeing Mrs. Hubbell off; then, on his way back, he drove round to his own house, which even to him seemed lonely, with all the paraphernalia of babyhood removed. Still, now that the worst was over, he rather enjoyed it, for Katy was free from care; there was nothing to hinder her gratifying his every wish, and with his spirits greatly enlivened as he reflected how satisfactory everything had been managed at the last, he proposed taking both Helen and Katy to the theatre that night. But Katy answered, “No, Wilford, not to-night; it seems too much like baby’s funeral. I’ll go next week, but not to-night.” So Katy had her way, and among the worshipers who next day knelt in Grace Church, with words of prayer upon their lips, there was not one more in earnest than she, whose only theme was, “My child, my darling child.” She did not get over it by Monday, as Mrs. Cameron had predicted. She did not get over it at all, though she went without a word where Wilford willed that she should go, and was ere long a belle again, but nothing had power to draw one look from her blue eyes, the look which many observed, and which Helen knew sprang from the mother-love, hungering for its child. Only once before had Helen seen a look like this, and that had come to Morris’s face on the sad night when she said to him, “It might have been.” It had been there ever since, and Helen felt that by the pangs with which that look was born he was a better man, just as Katy was growing better for that hunger in her heart. God was taking His own way to purify them both, and Helen watched intently, wondering what the end would be. CHAPTER XXV. AUNT BETSY GOES ON A JOURNEY.