its mother's care, the Tenas Klootchman turned to Maarda,
laughed to her, crowed to her, until her lonely heart embraced the
child as a still evening embraces a tempestuous day. Once she had a
long, terrible fight with herself. She had begun to feel her
ownership in the little thing, had begun to regard it as her right
to tend and pet it. Her heart called out for it; and she wanted it
for her very own. She began to feel a savage, tigerish joy in
thinking--aye, _knowing_ that it really would belong to her and to
her alone soon--very soon.

When this sensation first revealed itself to her, the doctor was
there--had even told her the woman could not recover. Maarda's
gloriously womanly soul was horrified at itself. She left the
doctor in charge, and went to the shore, fighting out this
outrageous gladness, strangling it--killing it.

She returned, a sanctified being, with every faculty in her body,
every sympathy of her heart, every energy of her mind devoted to
bringing this woman back from the jaws of death. She greeted the
end of it all with a sorrowing, half-breaking heart, for she had
learned to love the woman she had envied, and to weep for the
little child who lay so helplessly against her unselfish heart.

A beautifully lucid half-hour came to the fever-stricken one just
before the Call to the Great Beyond!

"Maarda," she said, "you have been a good Tillicum to me, and I
can give you nothing for all your care, your kindness--unless--"
Her eyes wandered to her child peacefully sleeping in the
delicately-woven basket. Maarda saw the look, her heart leaped with
a great joy. Did the woman wish to give the child to her? She dared
not ask for it. Suppose Luke "Alaska" wanted it. His wife loved
children, though she had four of her own in their home far inland.
Then the sick woman spoke:

"Your cradle basket and your heart were empty before I came. Will
you keep my Tenas Klootchman as your own?--to fill them both
again?"

Maarda promised. "Mine was a Tenas Klootchman, too," she said.

"Then I will go to her, and be her mother, wherever she is, in the
Spirit Islands they tell us of," said the woman. "We will be but
exchanging our babies, after all."

When morning dawned, the woman did not awake.

* * * * *

Maarda had finished her story, but the recollections had saddened
her eyes, and for a time we both sat on the deck in the violet
twilight without exchanging a word.

"Then