something that cried out with a plaintive little
cry.

Daisy looked down: that something
looked up. The moonlight shone full on
the wistful face of a child who, curled up
near one of the corn-stooks, had fallen
asleep forgotten. Forgotten by whom?
Why did it never occur to Daisy to think
that it had been forgotten by one of the
women working in the field? Why did
Daisy at once (as if in the world there
were but one child) take it for granted,
with her heart, that this child was her
own? To find it there, forgotten, told her
fully what was the great trouble fallen on
the house, and of the helplessness of the
one who had been its helper. It was the
foster-mother, then, and not the child whom
death had taken. The hurried intimation
of sorrow and death she had received had
left it doubtful to her what had befallen.

As Daisy looked down upon the child,
the child looked up at Daisy. Before Daisy
knew what she was about, before she
understood anything with her understanding,
though with her heart she knew it
all, the little forlorn child was in her arms;
she, on the ground, on her knees, was
pressing it to her bosom, covering it with
kisses, bathing it with tears, tears of a
most thankful joy! One would have said
this woman's heart had long been hungry
for this child!

It was all ended. The struggle was over.
That child was now lord and master of its
mother's life: she was conscious, in some
vague sort, that what her arms held was now
her world. Daisy was there, on the ground,
a long time; coming, only by degrees, out
of the sort of trance into which she had at
first fallen to a sense of there being
something beyond and outside this moonlit
and tented field in which she lay with her
child. The little one, feeling iteelf cradled
softly, warmly, lovingly, had fallen asleep
again.

Consciousness of the price to be paid for
her child dawned upon her. That life, as
Kenneth Stewart's wife, which had seemed
to her so happy, she had been tempted to
think that conscience could not trouble it,
regret touch it, or sorrow reach it, would
be, for ever, impossible. But all that might
have been seemed far off and long ago,
while the child which was in her arms was
her present. Had it, at this moment, been
possible that she should have had the choice
between Kenneth Stewart and the child,
there would have been no hesitation, but,
for all answer, a closer, more passionately
clinging clasp of the child. There might
afterwards have come times in which she
would have thought it hard that, for this
child's sake, a child who was not the child
of love, she should have, all her life, to live
loverless, husbandless, and friendless — a
widow loathing to remember that she had
been a wife, a mother dreading to see the
father of the child live again in her boy;
but there was no room in her heart for
such thoughts now.

"My son, my little son, my own darling
little son!" was said with a very ecstasy
of joyful possession. Poor foolish Daisy!
With one faithful friend lying dead close at
hand, her only other friend divided from her
for ever (as she believed) by what she held
in her arms. What she held in her arms,
nevertheless, for that time, made her happy!
She could have believed, for that time, that
all the intolerable ache of longing and of
loneliness that had filled the few last
months of her life (while she had been
believing in love between Mr. Stewart and
Myrrha) had been caused by the want of
her child. By-and-bye it seemed to Daisy
that a shadow passed between her and the
moonlight— looking up she saw no one. But
she was roused to the remembrance that it
was late in the night, and that her child
ought to be in his little bed. She who,
just now, had hardly been able to move
her unburdened limbs, got up and walked
bravely to the house, carrying the child.
The door stood open, Daisy went in. An
old woman sat crying over the kitchen-fire.
She showed no surprise on seeing Daisy.

"She said you'd be here by night. And
so you've found the child!" she sobbed.
"Poor, pretty, precious, forgotten lamb!"

She held her arms out to take the little
one from Daisy. Daisy still retained him
jealously.

"Which room is ready for me? The
one I used to have? I'll put him to bed
there," she said. For the first time she
undressed her own child. He wakened, and
seeing a strange face bending over him,
cried, but she soon soothed him to sleep
again. Then she went and stood by her
dead friend.

"I hope you know"— Daisy whispered
softly close in her ear— "I hope you know
that it is as you prayed it might be— that
the mother's heart is wakened in me, and
that I will live for my child. I hope you
know."

And then it seemed to Daisy, from
whose eyes tears were freely streaming, as
if the dear lips smiled. Daisy did not see
any one but the old woman that night. Her
friend's husband was sleeping the first