"Not much!" And here Betty twinkled. "I go there to meet Betty Arnold face to face, and ask her if she would rather trade back. And then I come trotting home, almost out of breath, to precious old Brace; I'm so afraid he won't know he's still the one big thing in the world for me." This little child of Betty's and Brace's had made a deep impression upon them all. It had lived only three days and while it stayed the black shadow hanging over the mother had made the baby seem of less account; but later, they all recalled the pretty, soft mite with the strange, old look in its wide eyes. He had been beautiful as babies who are not going to stay often are. There were to be no years for him to change and grow and so loveliness came with him. "I reckon the little chap thought we didn't want him," Brace choked as he spoke over the small, cold body of his first-born, "so he turned back home before he forgot the way." "Don't, brother!" Lynda pleaded as she stood with Truedale beside him. "You know the way home might have been longer and harder, by and by." "I wish Betty and I might have helped to make it easier; for a time, anyway." The eternal revolt against seemingly useless suffering rang in the words. And that night Truedale had kissed Lynda lingeringly. "Such things," he said, referring to the day's sad duties, "such things do drag people together." After that something new throbbed in their lives--something that had not held sway before. If Betty looked and listened for the little creature who had gone on ahead, Lynda listened and looked into what had been a void in her life before. She had always loved children in a kindly, detached way, but she had never appropriated them. But now she could not forget the feeling of that small, downy head that for a day or so nestled on her breast while the young mother's feet all but slipped over the brink. She remembered the strange look in the child's deep eyes the night it died. The lonely, aged look that, in passing, seemed trying to fix one familiar object. And when the dim light went out in the little face and only a dead baby lay in her arms, maternity had been called forth from its slumber and in following Betty's child, became vitalized and definite. "I--I think I shall adopt a child." So she had thought while the cold little head yet lay in the hollow of her arm. She never let go this thought and only hesitated before voicing it to Truedale because she feared he could not understand and might cruelly misunderstand. Life was hard enough and difficult enough for them both just then, and often, coming into the quiet home at the day's end, Lynda would say, to cheer her faint heart: "Oh, well, it's really like coming to a hearth upon which the fire is not yet kindled. But, thank heaven! it is a clean hearth, not cluttered with ashes--it is ready for the fire."