“He’s due to drop off to sleep now,” announced Leader in such a positive, though kind, voice that almost immediately young Stivers obediently turned himself a bit, settled in a nice, soggy way, and I could feel the little lungs so near mine begin to draw breath in a regular, good sound sleep. I waited a minute to be sure, then sank with him into a chair beside the fire. “Yes, he’s all right now,” Leader said in a lovely, quiet voice, with just a husky note of happiness in it as he gently raised into his own strong hand one tiny paddie that had stolen up on my breast from out the warm, gray shirt. For a wonderful second we were all soul-becalmed together, and then he went over into the corner and slipped on his khaki hunting-coat, which he had hung on a peg in the wall, and decorously tied his silk handkerchief around his neck, in true mountaineer fashion. He never did get that shirt again, for I originated some remarkable bandages for young Stivers out of it next day. [Illustration: Color-Tone, engraved for ~The Century~ by H. Davidson “‘ARE YOU REAL?’ HE WHISPERED, WITH MY CHEEK PRESSED HARD AGAINST HIS, AND HIS ARMS TERRIFIC WITH TENDERNESS” DRAWN BY F. R. GRUGER] Then he came back to the fire, and while I hovered the kiddie, the mother came close on her knees and settled beside us, so that together we took a worse ministerial drubbing than even Bill got for the knifing episode, delivered in a voice of such heavenly sympathy that Grandmother Wickliffe’s spirit again rose in me, and if it hadn’t been for the baby, I believe she would have broken out this time in one good shout. She hasn’t up to date, but I feel sure she will some day, and I don’t always intend to restrain her manifestations. The sermon this time had for its text the sacredness of the use of the maternal fount for the young instead of promiscuous food, but it embraced all the advanced feminist questions of the day, and was an awful glorification and arraignment of human females all in one breath. Why don’t women begin to know what dreadful and wonderful creatures they really are earlier in life? The knowledge comes with an awful shock when it does come, and ought to be experienced while young. I had taken Bill’s sermon to heart, but that one to Mrs. Stivers I got right in the center of my soul. It is still there. And when it was over, the poor mother was kneeling by the fire, with the baby at her breast, sobbing and crooning softly as she rocked it to and fro in its deep sleep. “It’s suffocating in here, now that it is all over. Don’t you want to come out and watch the storm?” Gabriel asked me in a low voice as he stood beside me looking down on the comfortable pair on the hearth. “Don’t be afraid. It is a great one, mostly electrical, and will likely go on all night this way. It makes the atmosphere almost unendurably heavy. Do you want to watch it from the bluff there at the end of the clearing? You can look down and see it at play in the valley.”