One day its little, warm lips had been pressed to hers, while its eyes looked inquiringly into her face with the mysterious intensity of infancy. The next, the waxen body lay cold and still before her unknowing and unheeding, and the weighted agony of her heart was beyond expression. Oh, mothers who have had this experience, how I pity you! How my heart bleeds for you! It is to tear out a vital part of your being, to rend the very cords of life, to see that precious little casket of clay, so pure, so fair, borne away. How can you bear it? Lissa did not bear her trial bravely, but sank beneath it. For days she neither ate nor slept. She would sit in the spot where her baby died, and beg that it should return to her. She would pray that it might become materialized and appear to her as the children she had at one time seen come from a cabinet at a seance. That seemed to be her one thought, to see it, to feel its little warm hands once more. Nathan watched her with increasing anxiety, scarce naming, even to himself, what he feared. At last one morning she startled him by declaring that the child had come to her in the night. That she had seen it and touched its hands. “It was but a dream, dearest. Little Lucy is safe in Jesus’ arms. Think of that, Lissa, safe!” She turned from him impatiently. “I don’t want to think of it. I want her myself. I have the best right to her. It was cruel to take my baby, my only one. He must let her come back to me.” “But, my dear, that is impossible. Our little one is safe in a better world, where no harm nor evil can approach her. She is waiting for us there. Some day you can go to her, Lissa, but she may not come to you.” “But I know she can and does. She is there in that corner of the room. Sit very still, and she will come to you. See her?” Nathan, startled in spite of himself, would sit, awed and expectant, looking in the direction indicated, while his wife, wrapped in eager absorption, would remain motionless, becoming angry if he disturbed her. And thus the weeks passed, bringing no relief. Lissa’s nature seemed completely changed. She no longer took interest in her household affairs, but left everything to her domestic, who at best was an indifferent housekeeper. Nathan came home each week to find neglect and chaos, where had once been care and order. Lissa was petulant and easily irritated, and her dark, sad eyes looked as if she never slept. She lost in flesh and color and her constant and ever-recurring theme of conversation was the child she had lost. “Ah, how far from comforting is this belief which my poor wife has embraced! If Lissa would only become reconciled to the fact that the child cannot come to her again, she would soon recover from her sorrow,” he said to Mark Cramer, as after an unusually trying hour with her he walked slowly with his brother-in-law toward the latter’s house. “It is certainly wrong to try to recall the dead.”