f home cares,
could make herself so comfortable.

"Isa!"--and then Isa heard.

"What is it?" she turned a steady glance toward the bed. She did not
intend that Joyce should be exacting. Women were apt to be unless the
nurse was rigid. "Do you want anything?"

"Oh! Isa is that--my baby?" There was such a thrill in the voice that
Isa was at once convinced that Joyce was delirious.

She was going to have her hands full. A mere baby, to Isa, was no cause
for that tone, and the glorified look.

"I guess there ain't any one else going to put in a claim for him," she
replied with a vague sense of humorously calming the patient.

"Him!" Joyce's tears again overflowed. "Did you say 'him' Isa?"

"There, there! do be still now, Joyce, and take a nap. You won't have
any too much time for lazing. You better make the most of it."

"It's a boy. Oh! It seems too, too heavenly. _My_ little boy! Isa,
is--is--he beautiful?"

And now no doubts remained in Isa's mind. She must pacify this very
trying case.

"'Bout as beautiful as they make 'em," she said slowly, and tried to
remember what was given to patients when they became unmanageable.

"Does--does he look--like--" the words came pantingly--"like the picture
in the other room?"

Isa was sitting opposite the door leading into the living room, and her
eyes fell, as Joyce spoke, upon the Madonna and Child.

Then, in spite of her anxiety and weariness, Isa laughed. The entire
train of events since her arrival the day before had appealed to her
latent sense of humour.

"Oh! exactly," she answered and rolling the baby in a blanket she strode
over to the bed, and placed him hastily beside Joyce.

"There," she said soothingly; "now lay still or you'll hurt the little
beauty. I'm going to fix something comforting to drink."

She was gone. In the mystery of the still room and the early morning,
Joyce was alone with her little son!

As she felt, so all motherhood, as God designed it, should feel. Before
the acceptance of the wonderful gift, motherhood stood entranced. Fear
and awe hold even love in abeyance. Into poor, loving, human hands a
soul--an eternal soul--was entrusted. No wonder even mother-love held
back before it consecrated itself to the sacred and everlasting
responsibility.

Joyce only dumbly felt this. All that she was conscious of was a fear
that her joy, when she looked upon the blessed little face, would kill
her, and so end what had but begun.

A new an