those fat brown legs!"

"How beautiful to have a child like that, of one's own!" thought
Lavendar as he looked. On the sands around them, there were numbers of
such children playing there in the sun. It seemed a happy world to him
at the moment.

Suddenly he saw his companion turn quickly aside; a nurse in uniform
came towards them pushing, not a happy crooning baby this time, but a
little emaciated wisp of a child lying back wearily in a wheel chair.
Something in Robinette's face, or perhaps the bit of fluttering lace
she wore upon her white dress, had attracted its notice, and it
stretched out two tiny skeleton hands towards her as it passed. With a
quick gesture, brushing tears away that in a moment had rushed to her
eyes, young Mrs. Loring stepped forward, and put her fingers into the
wasted hands that were held out to her. She hung above the child for a
moment, a radiant figure, her face shining with sympathy and a sort of
heavenly kindness; her eyes the sweeter for their tears.

"What is it, darling?" she asked. "Oh, it's the bright rose!" Then she
hurriedly unfastened the flower from her waist-belt and turned to
Lavendar. "Will you please take your penknife and scrape away all the
little thorns," she asked.

"The rose looked very charming where it was," he remarked, half
regretfully, as he did what she commanded.

"It will look better still, presently," she answered.

The child's hands were outstretched longingly to grasp the flower, its
eyes, unnaturally deep and wise with pain, were fixed upon Robinette's
face. She bent over the chair, and her voice was like a dove's voice,
Lavendar thought, as she spoke. Then the little melancholy carriage
was wheeled away. Motherhood always seemed the most sacred, the
supreme experience to Robinette; a thing high and beautiful like the
topmost blooms of Nurse Prettyman's plum tree. "If one had to choose
between that sturdy boy and this wistful wraith, it would be hard,"
she thought. "All my pride would run out to the boy, but I could die
for love and pity if this suffering baby were mine!"

Lavendar had turned, and leaned on the wall with averted face. "Sweet
woman!" he was saying to himself. "It is more than a merry heart that
is able to give such sympathy; it's a sad old world after all where
such things can be; but a woman like that can bring good out of
evil."

Robinette had seated herself on a low wall beside him. Her little
embroidered futility of a handkerch