But the emotion displayed by the giantess gave the girl pause. On the threshold of Mrs. Langley’s room she was seized with sudden apprehension. Suppose it should be too much for the invalid! Her reiterated phrase as to its breaking her heart to see the baby acquired a warning significance. On a sudden Anna wished with all her heart that she hadn’t insisted. Suppose the shock were too much for Mrs. Langley! “We’re here,” she said faintly, ready to back out across the threshold at a word. “Come up near,” Mrs. Langley bade her more hoarsely than usual and not at all reassuringly. She obeyed tremblingly. Taking the customary chair, she settled the baby comfortably and fixed her eyes upon his wisp of hair. If she hadn’t heard her heart beating wildly she wouldn’t have believed that she breathed at all. For a few moments Mrs. Langley peered at the child in silence. He was beautifully dressed, but he wasn’t at all what she had expected from Anna’s and her husband’s accounts. He wasn’t even what a baby would naturally have been expected to be apart from pardonable exaggeration. He wasn’t round nor rosy nor pretty; he looked like nothing so much as a very ugly rubber doll dressed in fine raiment. Moreover, Ella Langley had so dreaded the ordeal that cold sweat stood upon her forehead in beads. None the less, as she gazed, her heart warmed. There was, somehow, something appealing in his big, mournful eyes and plaintive little white, pinched face and perhaps even in the very want of baby charms. The woman hadn’t seen a child for years upon years and suddenly her heart yearned towards this one overwhelmingly. “O Anna, let me take him in my arms,” she entreated in a voice Anna had never heard before. Surprised and delighted, and without for the moment considering the significance of it, the girl rose quickly to put the baby into the outstretched arms. But for the first time Joe, Junior, who went mournfully wherever he was placed, indifferent to all but Anna, resisted--resisted convulsively. Springing back with a strength he had not seemed to possess, he clung to Anna with a grasp that was painful in its intensity. Then as Mrs. Langley’s hand fell gently upon his shoulder, he uttered a piercing cry--such a shriek as had never before echoed within the parsonage walls. His arms tight about Anna’s neck, clutching like a frightened wild animal, Joe, Junior, continued to shriek and without pause. Never before since Anna had known him had the baby uttered a sound above a mere whimper. The girl’s blood congealed for terror. As he continued to scream in a manner that seemed to stop her heart and paralyze her muscles, she stood motionless for a few seconds. Recovering herself, she fled wildly from the room.