"Oh, please! I'll make up your bed and you can rest----"

"I'm not sleepy. I'm not much of a hand to sleep anyway. I'll
sit up here in the hall, where there's a light. You get to bed.
I'll watch and see that everything's all right. Have you got
something I can read out here--something kind of lively--with a
love story in it?"

So the night went by. Snooky slept in her white bed. The Very
Young Wife half dozed in her bed, so near the little one. In the
hall, her stout figure looming grotesque in wall shadows, sat
Blanche Devine, pretending to read. Now and then she rose and
tiptoed into the bedroom with miraculous quiet, and stooped over
the little bed and listened and looked--and tiptoed away again,
satisfied.

The Young Husband came home from his business trip next day with
tales of snowdrifts and stalled engines. Blanche Devine breathed
a sigh of relief when she saw him from her kitchen window. She
watched the house now with a sort of proprietary eye. She
wondered about Snooky; but she knew better than to ask. So she
waited. The Young Wife next door had told her husband all about
that awful night--had told him with tears and sobs. The Very
Young Husband had been very, very angry with her-- angry, he
said, and astonished! Snooky could not have been so sick! Look
at her now! As well as ever. And to have called such a woman!
Well, he did not want to be harsh; but she must understand that
she must never speak to the woman again. Never!

So the next day the Very Young Wife happened to go by with the