d her neck, and he called her
his dear sweet, pink lady, her pseudo-intellectuality broke down before
a power which had lain dormant. She had always talked a great deal of
the joys of motherhood, and the rapturous delights of mother-love. Not
many of the mothers knew as much of the proper care of an infant during
the period of dentition as she. She had read papers at mothers'
meetings, and was as full of health talks as a school physiology.

But it was the touch of Danny's soft cheek and clinging arms that
brought to her the rapture that is so sweet it hurts, and she realised
that she had missed the sweetest thing in life. A tiny flame of real
love began to glimmer in her heart and feebly shed its beams among the
debris of cold theories and second-hand sensations that had filled it
hitherto.

She worried Danny with her attentions, although he tried hard to put up
with them. She was the lady of his dreams, for Pearl's imagination had
clothed her with all the virtues and graces.

Hers was a strangely inconsistent character, spiritually minded, but
selfish; loving humanity when it is spelled with a capital, but knowing
nothing of the individual. The flower of holiness in her heart was like
the haughty orchid that blooms in the hothouse, untouched by wind or
cold, beautiful to behold but comforting no one with its beauty.

Pearl Watson was like the rugged little anemone, the wind flower that
lifts its head from the cheerless prairie. No kind hand softens the
heat or the cold, nor tempers the wind, and yet the very winds that
blow upon it and the hot sun that beats upon it bring to it a grace, a
hardiness, a fragrance of good cheer, that gladdens the hearts of all
who pass that way.

Mrs. Francis found herself strongly attracted to Pearl. Pearl, the
housekeeper, the homemaker, a child with a woman's responsibility,
appealed to Mrs. Francis. She thought about Pearl very often.

Noticing one day that Pearl was thin and pale, she decided at once that
she needed a health talk. Pearl sat like a graven image while Mrs.
Francis conscientiously tried to stir up in her the seeds of right
living.

"Oh, ma!" Pearl said to her mother that night, when the children had
gone to bed and they were sewing by the fire. "Oh, ma! she told me more
to-day about me insides than I would care to remember. Mind ye, ma,
there's a sthring down yer back no bigger'n a knittin' needle, and if
ye ever broke it ye'd snuff out before ye knowed what ye