with us on our return to the frontier; privately, I resolved to
dispute it, and, if necessary, I saw myself abducting the child--my
own child. My days and nights as the ship crept on were full of a
long ache to possess her; the defrauded tenderness of the last four
years rose up in me and sometimes caught at my throat. I could
think and talk and dream of nothing else. John indulged me as much
as was reasonable, and only once betrayed by a yawn that the subject
was not for him endlessly absorbing. Then I cried and he
apologized. 'You know,' he said, 'it isn't exactly the same thing.
I'm not her mother.' At which I dried my tears and expanded, proud
and pacified. I was her mother!

Then the rainy little station and Alice, all-embracing in a damp
waterproof, and the drive in the fly, and John's mother at the gate
and a necessary pause while I kissed John's mother. Dear thing, she
wanted to hold our hands and look into our faces and tell us how
little we had changed for all our hardships; and on the way to the
house she actually stopped to point out some alterations in the
flower-borders. At last the drawing-room door and the smiling
housemaid turning the handle and the unforgettable picture of a
little girl, a little girl unlike anything we had imagined, starting
bravely to trot across the room with the little speech that had been
taught her. Half-way she came; I suppose our regards were too
fixed, too absorbed, for there she stopped with a wail of terror at
the strange faces, and ran straight back to the outstretched arms of
her Aunt Emma. The most natural thing in the world, no doubt. I
walked over to a chair opposite with my hand-bag and umbrella and
sat down--a spectator, aloof and silent. Aunt Emma fondled and
quieted the child, apologizing for her to me, coaxing her to look
up, but the little figure still shook with sobs, hiding its face in