"Did you notice the account of that painful accident in Westbourne Grove in this morning's 'News'? Those terrible perambulators! I wish they could be abolished. Maid servants' arms were stouter in my day. This stupid German nurse seems to have got dazed, or was staring everywhere but where her business lay. An only child, the paper stated, an editor's, but I don't remember the name. It was not one familiar to me. Did you know it?" "I've heard it," Ronayne answered, and would have changed the subject, but I broke in: "Oh, Ronayne, a German nurse! Can anything have happened to Mrs. Malise's baby? You needn't be silent. Oh, I'm sure it's he!" And then it all came out--the fact that the child was killed while his nurse was trying to wheel him across the road in Westbourne Grove--but Ronayne wouldn't have any details told me. The poor little man! My own baby's age, and such a sweet-tempered, patient little fellow! What a life! To come where he had but grudging welcome, to have no real mother, no warm little places of fond sunshine, and to go away from all this world's possibilities in that sudden cruelty! It wrung my heart, the hardness of it all. But could I really grieve, remembering how chill was the brief life, and remembering, above all, the scheme that was to make of him, so helpless and undefended, a spiritual outcast and foundling? And since I saw his mother--I went yesterday, having first sacked Henley of white flowers, heliotrope, and fragrant leaves--and found her unshaken in composure, untouched by any sense of duty missed--since then I think I have been only glad that the little soul has taken flight. Very white and peaceful he looked lying in his crib, and I heaped my flowers all about him. "How much you loved him!" Mrs. Malise said, as she stood beside me looking at him. "And how pretty and happy he looks! I wonder if he is happy--if he _is_ anywhere?" "Well, some time we shall know! And perhaps it is better for him as it is. Often and often his father and I were perplexed as to what we ought to do for him by and by. At any rate he's past our marring! And I hope we shall have no more children to deal with--be responsible for." Ronayne says I ought to add what I have only told him under my breath, that it completes my sketch of this "advanced" woman, a mother despite herself. On leaving I said to her something as to where the boy would be buried. "It is not quite settled," she replied, "but Kensal Green, I suppose. We are both strong advocates of cremation, and wish so much that it were a present possibility. If it were, and even a difficult one, we should certainly bear our practical testimony to the more sanitary way of disposing of our dead. But----" "Heaven help you!" I interrupted; "and farewell!" We dare not tell this to nurse, who, though she was the little fellow's fast friend, cried out at the first news of his death: