ot laid down her
knitting for an instant; and standing now beside the bed, she jerked the
gray yarn automatically through her twisted fingers. The clicking of the
long wooden needles formed an accompaniment to the dry, hard sound of
her words.

"Why doesn't some one hush that child?" asked Corinna impatiently.
Through the open window a breeze entered, bringing the thin restless
wail of the baby.

"The mother tries, but she can't do anything. She thinks the milk went
wrong and gave it colic."

The woman on the bed spoke suddenly in a clear voice. "Why doesn't he
come?" she demanded. Raising her heavy lids she looked straight into
Corinna's eyes, with a lucid and comprehending expression, as if she had
just awakened from sleep.

Holding her knitting away from the bed with one hand, and bending over,
until her deformed shape made a hill against the bedpost, the old woman
screamed into the ear on the pillow, as if the hearer were either deaf
or at a great distance. Though her manner was not heartless, it was as
impassive as philosophy.

"He is coming," she shrieked.

"Is he bringing the child?"

"She is already here. Can't you see her there at the foot of the bed?"

The large black eyes, drained of any human expression, turned slowly
toward the figure of Patty.

"But she is a little thing," said the woman doubtfully. "She is not
three years old yet. What has he done with her? He told me that he would
take care of her as if she belonged to him."

The old hunchback, bending her inscrutable face, screamed again into the
ear on the pillow.

"That was near sixteen years ago, Maggie," she said. "Have you
forgotten?"

The woman closed her eyes wearily. "Yes, I had forgotten," she answered.
"Time goes so."

But it appeared to Corinna, sitting there, with her eyes on the strip of
sky which was visible through the window, that time would never go on. A
pitiless fact was breaking into her understanding, shattering wall after
wall of incredulity, of conviction that such a thing was too terrible to
be true. She longed to get Patty away; but when she urged her in a
whisper to go downstairs, the girl only shook her head, without moving
her eyes from the haggard face on the pillow. The minutes dragged by
like hours while they waited there, in hushed suspense, for they
scarcely knew what. Outside in the backyard, the flowering ailantus tree
shed a disagreeable odour; downstairs the feeble crying, which had
stopped for a l