“It’s Christmas that upsets me so! Christmas that brings it all back on me so. And then to-day she sent, Florence herself, she sent the baby’s picture on a post-card. It’s signed ‘From Florence.’ You’d think after all that’s happened, she’d have let Dan send it, the first word I’ve had from either of them for three years!” She rose and filled the coffee cup abruptly. “Well,” she jerked the words out, “Christmas and other days, I’ve got to grin and bear it, being turned out by my son’s wife. But it’s been worse since there was a baby.” “It’s the baby’s first Christmas,” mused the Bishop. “Yes, he’s seven months and sixteen days old.” The Bishop smiled up at her, “May I see him? Where is the picture?” She laid it before him. The Bishop adjusted his glasses, then removed them to look from the picture to a keen scrutiny of the grandmother’s face. “Yes,” she answered his look. “You see it then? The baby looks like us, like Dan and me. And I can see Dan’s father in him, too. There’s not a hair of him that looks like the Reynoldses,--that lot!” The Bishop was examining the photograph minutely. Mrs. Graham looked over his shoulder, but at his next word she moved away again. “That’s his mother’s hand holding him, isn’t it, that shadow under his arm?” “Yes! His mother’s hand! He looks like us, but he don’t belong to us! He’s hers!” The Bishop glanced up, “And I suppose he’s also the other grandmother’s.” “No! Florence has no mother. I’m all the grandmother that baby’s got!” “I think you never told me that before,” he paused thoughtfully, then looking over to her standing by the window, he said, feeling slowly for words, “So the baby’s mother, that girl out at Fair-Orchard, has had no mother--to go with her--on that way--a woman goes, to bring home, a little child?” The Bishop’s voice was soft with the awe of many years ago. The grandmother flushed, muttering, “She would not have wanted _me_. She had Dan.” The Bishop’s eyelids had fallen, quivering, over his eyes. He was far away; again he watched with Annie, with Nan, as he said, “But men cannot understand. God does not mean them to. Such things are a secret between God and women, like the coming of Mary’s little child. Each mother needs a mother then. It was not--it was not till then that I understood how much my Nan had lost when she lost her mother.” “It did not live, did it, at all, your daughter’s child?” whispered Mrs. Graham.