"Well," Julia remarked with feeble dispa.s.sionateness, "I wouldn't 'f I was you."

"Are you willing I should have it?" I asked.

"Oh, I'm willing anything he wants," was her answer. "He's awful good to marry me. He never said he would. He's real white, he is."

She was quiet a moment, and then she broke out in a burst of joy.

"I never 'sposed I'd marry a real gentleman!" she cried.

Her shallow delight in marrying above her station was too pathetic to be offensive. I was somehow so moved by it that I turned away to hide my face from her; but she caught my hand and drew me back. Then she peered at me closely.

"You don't like it," she said excitedly. "You won't try to stop him?"

"No," I answered. "I think he ought to do it for the sake of his child."

She dropped her hold, and a curious look came into her face.

"That's what he said. Yer don't either of yer seem to count me for much."

I was silent, convicted to the soul that I had not counted her for much. I had accepted Tom's decision as right, not for the sake of this broken girl-mother, this castaway doomed to shame from her cradle, but for the sake purely of the baby that I was to take. It came over me how I might have been influenced too much by the selfish thought that it would be intolerable for me to have the child unless it had been as far as might be legitimatized by this marriage. I flushed with shame, and without knowing exactly what I was doing I bent over and kissed her.

"It is you he marries," I said.

Her tears sprang instantly, tears, I believe, of pure happiness.

"You're real good," she murmured, and then closed her eyes, whether from weakness or to conceal her emotion I could not be sure.

It was nearly eight before Mr. Thurston came. Tom has never been on good terms with Mr. Saychase, and it must have been easier for him to have a clergyman with whom he had never, I suppose, exchanged a word, than one who knew him and his people. I took the precaution to say at once to Mr.

Thurston that Julia was too ill to bear much, and that he must not say a word more than was necessary.

"I will only offer prayer," he returned.

I know Mr. Thurston's prayers. I have heard them at funerals when I have been wickedly tempted to wonder whether he were not attempting to fill the interval between us and the return of the lost at the Resurrection.

"I am afraid it will not do," I told him. "You do not realize how feeble she is."

"Then I will only give them the blessing. Perhaps I might talk with Mr.

Webbe afterward, or pray with him."

I knew that if this proposition were made to Tom he would say something which would wound the clergyman's feelings.

"Mr. Thurston," I urged, "if you'll pardon me, I wouldn't try to say anything to him just now. He is doing a plucky thing, and a thing that's n.o.ble, but it must be terribly hard. I don't think he could endure to have anybody talk to him. He'll have to be left to fight it out for himself."

It was not easy to convince Mr. Thurston, for when once a narrow man gets an idea of duty he can see nothing else; but I managed in the end to save Tom at least the irritation of having to fight off religious appeals. The ceremony was as brief as possible. It was touching to see how humble and yet how proud Julia was. She seemed to feel that Tom was a sort of G.o.d in his goodness in marrying her,--and after all perhaps she was partly right. His coldness only made her deprecatory. I wondered how far she was conscious of his evident shrinking from her. He seemed to hate even to touch her fingers. I cannot understand--

April 15. I have had many things to do in the last two days, and I find myself so tired with the stress of it all that I have not felt like writing. It is perhaps as much from a sort of feverish uneasiness as from anything else I have got out my diary to-night. The truth is, that I suffer from the almost intolerable suspense of waiting for Julia to die. Dr. Wentworth and Miss Dyer both are sure there is no chance whatever of her getting well, and I cannot think that it would be better for her, or for Tom, or for her baby--who is to be my baby!--if she should live. We are all a little afraid to say, or even to think, that it is better for a life of this sort to end, and I seem to myself inhuman in putting it down in plain words; but we cannot be rational without knowing that it is better certain persons should be out of the way, for their own sakes as well as for the good of the community, and the more quickly the better. Julia is a weed, poor thing, and the sooner she is pulled up the better for the garden. And yet I pity her so! I can understand religion easily when I think of lives like hers. It is so hard to see the justice of having the weed destroyed for the good of the flowers that men have to invent excuses for the Eternal. Somebody has defined theology as man's justification of a deity found wanting by human standards, and now I realize what this means. Human mercy could not bear to make a Julia, and a power which allows the possibility of such beings has to be excused to human reason. The G.o.ds that men invent always turn to Frankensteins on their hands. If there is a conscious power that directs, He must pity the gropings of our race, although I suppose seeing what it is all for and what it all leads to must make it possible to bear the sight of human weakness.

The baby is growing wonderfully attractive now she is so well fed and attended to. I am ashamed to think how little the poor wee morsel attracted me at first. She was so a.s.sociated with dreadful thoughts, and with things which I hated to know and did not wish to remember, that I shrank from her. Perhaps now the fact that she is to be mine inclines me to look at her with different eyes, but she is really a dear little thing, pretty and sweet. Oh, I will try hard to make her life lovely!

April 16. Aunt Naomi came in last night almost as soon as I was at home.

She should not have been out in the night air, I think, for her cold is really severe, and has kept her shut up in the house for a fortnight.

She was so eager for news, however, that she could not rest until she had seen me, and I am away all day.

"Well," was her greeting, "I am glad to see you at home once more. I've begun to feel as if you lived down in that little red house."

I said I had pretty nearly lived there for the last two weeks, but that since Miss Dyer came I had been able to get home at night most of the time.

"How do you like going out nursing?" she asked, thrusting her tongue into her cheek in that queer way she has.

I told her I certainly shouldn't think of choosing it as a profession, at least unless I could go to cleaner places.

"I hear you had Hannah clean up," she remarked with a chuckle.

"How did you hear that?" I asked her. "I thought you had been housed with a cold."

Aunt Naomi's smile was broad, and she swung her foot joyously.

"I've had all my faculties," she answered.

"So I should think. You must keep a troop of paid spies."

"I don't need spies. I just keep my eyes and ears open."

I wondered in my heart whether she had heard of the marriage, and as if she read the question in my mind, she answered it.

"I thought I'd like to know one thing, though," she observed with the air of one who candidly concedes that he is not infallible. "I'd like to know how the new Mrs. Webbe takes his marrying her."

"Aunt Naomi," I burst out in astonishment, "you are a witch, and ought to be looked after by the witch-finders."

Aunt Naomi laughed, and her eyes twinkled at the agreeable compliment I paid to her cleverness. Then she suddenly became grave.

"I am not sure, Ruth," she said, "that I should be willing to have your responsibility in making him marry such a girl."

I disclaimed the responsibility entirely, and declared I had not even suggested the marriage. I told her he had done it for the sake of the child, and that the proposition was his, and his only.

She sniffed contemptuously, with an air which seemed to cast doubts on my sanity.

"Very likely he did, and I don't suppose you did suggest it in words; but it's your doing all the same."

"I will not have the responsibility put on me," I protested. "It isn't for me to determine what Tom Webbe shall do."

"You can't help it," was her uncompromising answer. "You can make him do anything you want to."

"Then I wish I were wise enough to know what he ought to do," I could not help crying out. "Oh, Aunt Naomi, I do so want to help him!"

She looked at me with her keen old eyes, to which age has only imparted more sharpness. I should hate to be a criminal brought before her as my judge; her eyes would bring out my guilty secret from the cunningest hiding-place in my soul, and she would sentence me with the utmost rigor of the law. After the sentence had been executed, though, she would come with sharp tongue and gentle hands, and bind up my wounds. Now she did not answer my remark directly, but went on to question me about the Brownrig girl and the details of her illness; only when she went away she stopped to turn at the door and say,--