She had always loved children in a kindly, detached way, but she had never appropriated them.  But now she could not forget the feeling of that small, downy head that for a day or so nestled on her breast while the young mother’s feet all but slipped over the brink.  She remembered the strange look in the child’s deep eyes the night it died.  The lonely, aged look that, in passing, seemed trying to fix one familiar object.  And when the dim light went out in the little face and only a dead baby lay in her arms, maternity had been called forth from its slumber and in following Betty’s child, became vitalized and definite.

“I—­I think I shall adopt a child.”  So she had thought while the cold little head yet lay in the hollow of her arm.  She never let go this thought and only hesitated before voicing it to Truedale because she feared he could not understand and might cruelly misunderstand.  Life was hard enough and difficult enough for them both just then, and often, coming into the quiet home at the day’s end, Lynda would say, to cheer her faint heart: 

“Oh, well, it’s really like coming to a hearth upon which the fire is not yet kindled.  But, thank heaven! it is a clean hearth, not cluttered with ashes—­it is ready for the fire.”

But was it?  More and more as the time went on and Truedale kept his faith and walked his way near hers—­oh! they were thankful for that—­but still apart, Lynda wondered.  It was all so futile, so utterly selfish and childish—­yet neither spoke.  Then suddenly came the big thing that drove them together and swept aside all the barrier of rubbish they had erected.  Like many great and portentous things it seemed very like the still, small voice in the burning bush—­the tiny star in the black night.

Truedale had had an enlightening conversation with McPherson in the afternoon.  The old doctor was really a soft-hearted sentimentalist and occasionally he laid himself bare to the eye of some trustworthy friend.  This time it was Truedale.

Up and down the plain, businesslike office McPherson was tramping when Conning was announced.

“Oh! come in, come in!” called McPherson.  “You can better understand this than some.  I’ve had a devil of a day.  One confounded thing after another to take the soul out of me.  And now this letter from old Jim White!”

Conning started.  It had now been years since Pine Cone had touched his thought sharply.

“What’s the matter with White?” he asked.

“Look out of the window!”

Truedale did so, and into the wall-like snow which had been falling all day.