what he was, and in what he had. They had been married eight years,
and the slipping away of the first child, Margaret, was the only
sadness which had paused at their door. Mrs. Lord had been Ethel
Baxter for thirty years. Her father was an intense, high-strung
business man, an importer, who spent much time in Europe where he died
of an American-contracted typhoid-fever, when Ethel was ten. Her
mother was one of a large well-known Maryland family, fair, brown-eyed
too, and frail; also, by all the rights of inheritance, training and
development, sensitive and nervous. In her family the precedents of
blue blood were religiously maintained with so much emphasis on the
"blue" that no beginning was ever made in training her into a
protective robustness. So, in spite of elaborate preparation and noted
New York skill and the highest grade of conscientious nursing, she
recovered poorly after Ethel's birth. Strength, even such as she
formerly had, did not return. She didn't want to be an invalid. She
was devoted to her husband and eager to companion and mother her
child. The surgeons thought her recovery lay in their skill, and in
ten years one operated twice, and two others operated once each, but
for some reason the scalpel's edge did not reach the weakness. Then
Mr. Baxter died, and all of her physical discomforts seemed
intensified until, in desperation, the fifth operation was undertaken,
which was long and severe, and from which she failed to react. So
Ethel was an orphan at eleven, though not alone, for the good uncle,
her mother's brother, took her to his home and never failed to respond
to any impulse through which he felt he could fulfil the fatherhood
and motherhood which he had assumed. Absolutely devoted, affectionate,
emotional, he planned impulsively, he gave freely, but he knew not law
nor order in his own high-keyed life; so neither law nor order entered
into the training of his ward.