“One reason why I hate to give him up, Mrs. Lorraine, is because he’s Bessy’s baby and Joe’s,” she began wistfully. “He’s the only part of them and of that life that I’ve got left, you see. Not that I want ever to go back to it. I love the Hollow and Farleigh and all the people, and yet there’s something that makes me feel I don’t want to forget the other altogether. Bessy wore a pompadour that made even me shiver and she chewed gum, and Joe would have looked like a jumping-jack beside Reuben, and yet Bessy and Joe were both true blue. Bessy got all run down while Joe was sick going without things so that he could have milk and eggs, and when he got back to work he went without lunches so that she would think his pay was the same as it had been. And if Hazel or I or any of their friends had had hard luck, they would have taken them in and done everything for them the same as Hazel did for Bessy when the time came.” She looked entreatingly into Mrs. Lorraine’s dark eyes, which were sympathetic but perplexed. “You can’t understand how it is, unless you live right among them, but if you once have, there’s something mighty precious in the memory of that life that you wouldn’t lose hold of. If I didn’t want Joe, Junior, myself, I should want him because he’s Bessy’s and Joe’s,” she said earnestly. The girl was very quiet all the rest of the day. She pondered sadly over what Mrs. Lorraine had said and over what her words had further implied. She had not realised that they had missed her, her mother and the boys and Miss Penny and Alice--Alice most of all, perhaps, though her mother didn’t dream that. Perhaps she could do things for them that others couldn’t, while the baby would really be better off with the Langleys. Mr. Langley and Bell Adams would be wonderful with him and it began to look as if Mrs. Langley would make a creditable mother. And Alice needed her; and Alice’s mother needed something in Alice which perhaps only Anna could watch out for. And Alice had never been really happy until she was twenty and Mrs. Lorraine not until she was forty-five. And both had been so frightfully unhappy. And there was that terrible black shadow of the prison hanging over them for ten years to come. Giving up Joe, Junior, was of course only what she had planned to do in the first place. It was only what she had worked and struggled for ever since she had returned with the baby. And even before that, she had been longing to discover some means of repaying Mr. Langley for all he had done for Rusty and her family in general and to comfort him for losing his little Ella May after all the years. Yet now that she had it within her power to give him something that would be like his heart’s desire, she was grudging it. But O--that darling baby! And he loved her as he cared for no one else.