down at it hopelessly. She did not try to hush it.
"It's cried this way all night," she said, in a monotonous tone.
"It's goin' to die."

"Now, Laury, you know it ain't any sicker than it was before," John
said, with a kind of timid conciliation; but she turned upon him with
a fierce gleam lighting her dull eyes to life.

"You needn't talk to me," said she--"you needn't talk to me, John
Upham, when you won't have the doctor when it's your own flesh an'
blood that's dyin'. I don't care what he's done. I don't care if he
has taken the roof from over our heads. My child is worth more than
anything else. He'd come if you asked him, he couldn't refuse--you
know he couldn't, John Upham!"

John Upham's face was white; his forehead and his chin got a curious
hardness of outline. "He won't have a chance," he said, between his
teeth.

"Let your own flesh and blood die, then!" cried his wife; but the
fierceness was all gone from her voice; she had no power of sustained
wrath, so spent was she. She gave a tearless wail that united with
the child's in her lap in a pitiful chord of woe.

"Now, Laury, you know J'rome gave Minnie somethin' that helped her,
and she seemed every mite as sick as the baby," her husband said, in
a softer voice. But she turned her hopeless eyes again upon the
little, squalid, quivering thing in her lap, and paid no more heed to
him. She let Jerome examine the child, with a strange apathy. There
was no hope, and consequently no power of effort, left in her.

When Jerome brought some medicine in a spoon, she assisted him to
feed the child with it, but mechanically, and as if she had no
interest. Her sharp right elbow shone like a knob of ivory through a
great rent in her sleeve; her dress was unfastened, and there was a
gleam of white flesh through the opening; she neither knew nor cared.
There was no consciousness of self, no pride and no shame for self,
in her; she had ceased to live in the fullest sense; she was nothing
but the concentration of one emotion of despairing motherhood.

She heard Jerome and her husband moving about in the next room, she
heard the crackling of fire in the stove, the clinking din of dishes,
the scrape of a broom, not realizing in the least what the sounds
meant. She heard with her mind no sound of earth but the wail of the
sick baby in her lap.

Jerome Edwards could tidy a house as well as a woman, and John Upham
followed his directions with clumsy zeal. When the kitch