Cassandra rose and stood suddenly poised for flight. She must get out of that house and hear no more. She had a silver shilling in her hand, for Betty Towers had told her all servants expected a tip, and this was intended for the cabman. Had she followed her impulse, she would have darted by with her fingers in her ears, but instead, she dropped the shilling in the old man's hand, and quietly turned toward the door. "Thank you," his fingers closed over the shilling. Her pallor struck him then, even as the red spot on her cheek deepened, and he held out his arms for the child. "Let me carry 'im for you, ma'm. Is it a boy?" But her arms closed tighter about her baby. "He is my little son." It was almost a cry, as she said it, but again she forced herself to calmness, and, walking slowly out, added, with a quiet smile: "I always keep him myself. We do in America." In a moment she was gone. The warm sunlight burst in on them and flooded the cold hall as the old man stood in the doorway looking after the retreating cab, and down at the silver shilling. Darker, dingier, stuffier, seemed the box of a room, as she walked into it and laid her still sleeping babe on the bed. She felt herself moving in an unreal world. David--her David--she had not come to him after all; she had come to an empty place. She knelt and threw her arms about her little son, encircling his head and his feet. She neither wept nor prayed; and the red spot burned against the creamy whiteness of her skin. She was not thinking, only looking, seeing into the past and down the long vista of her future. Pictures came to her--pictures of her girlhood--her dim aspirations--her melancholy-eyed father--his hilltop--and beloved, sunlit mountains. In the radiance of the spring, she saw them, and in the glory of the autumn; she breathed the fragrance of the pines in winter and heard the soft patter of summer rains on widespreading leaves. She saw David walking at her side, and heard his laugh, sun-bright and glorious he seemed, her Phoebus Apollo--the father of her little son. She saw the terrible sea which she had crossed to come to him--the white-crested waves, with turquoise lights and indigo depths, shifting and sliding unceasingly where all the world seemed swallowed in space, and the huge steamship so small a thing in the vast and perilous deep; and now--now she was here. What was she? What was life?