a chicken-hawk?
Just excuse me, children; finish your dinner while I go out and look
after my feather babies." And Mother hurried away through the kitchen,
leaving the singer lady and the Doctor sitting at the table under the
fragrant vine, with the replete Martin Luther nodding his sleepy head
down into his plate between them.

And thus deserted, the flush rose up under Miss Wingate's eyes and a
dimple teased at the corner of her red lips, but she busied herself
with removing the plate from under Martin Luther's yellow mop and
making a pillow of her own bare arm, against which he nestled his
chubby little cheek with a sigh of content, as he drifted off into his
usual after-dinner nap.

The Doctor watched her from under his half-closed eyes, then he lit a
cigarette, leaned his elbow on the table and sat silent for a few
moments, while under her breath she hummed a little sleep song to the
drifting baby.

"On the whole," he asked at last, the usual delightful courtesy with
which he always addressed her striving with an unusual trace of gentle
banter in his deep voice, "what do you think of Mother's philosophies?"

"I think," she answered as she ruffled the baby's curls with one white
hand, "they are so true that no wonder they are--are more healing
than--than your medicines."

She raised her eyes to his suddenly and they were filled to the brim
with frank merriment.

"Don't tell me I'm going to lose my one and only star patient, Teether
Pike and the puppy excepted!" he exclaimed with a laugh.

"Yes," she answered slowly, "I'm going to let you operate when the time
comes--but it's your Mother that's healing me. Oh, can't you, can't you
see what she's doing for me?" she turned to him and asked suddenly, the
burr thrown across her voice heavily because of the passion in her
tones. "I came to you a broken instrument--useless for ever,
perhaps--unfit for all I knew of life unless you healed me, and
now--now I can make things and do things--a pie and a good one, bread
to feed and the butter thereto, and to-day two halves of a pair of
trousers, no the halves of two pairs of trousers. What matter if I
never sing again?" She stretched her white arm across the table and
looked over the head of the sleeping baby straight into his eyes. Hers
were soft with tears, and a divine shyness that seemed to question him.

He lifted the white hand, with its pink palm upward, gently into his
own brown one, and placed the tip of one o