“You know I can make that,” called Von Rosen in alarm.  “Don’t think of coming down.”

Von Rosen could make very good coffee.  It was an accomplishment of his college days.  He made some now.  He felt the need of it.  Then he handily served the very excellent dinner, and sat down at his solitary dining table.  As he ate his soup, he glanced across the table, and a blush like that of a girl overspread his dark face.  He had a vision of a high chair, and a child installed therein with the customary bib and spoon.  It was a singular circumstance, but everything in life moves in sequences, and that poor Syrian child upstairs, in her dire extremity, was furnishing a sequence in the young man’s life, before she went out of it.  Her stimulation of his sympathy and imagination was to change the whole course of his existence.

Meanwhile, Doctor Sturtevant was having a rather strenuous argument with his wife, who for once stood against him.  She had her not-to-be-silenced personal note.  She had a horror of the alien and unusual.  All her life she had walked her chalk-line, and anything outside savoured of the mysterious, and terrible.  She was Anglo-Saxon.  She was what her ancestresses had been for generations.  The strain was unchanged, and had become so tense and narrow that it was almost fathomless.  Mrs. Sturtevant, good and benevolent on her chalk-line, was involuntarily a bigot.  She looked at Chinese laundry men, poor little yellow figures, shuffling about with bags of soiled linen, with thrills of recoil.  She would not have acknowledged it to herself, for she came of a race which favoured abolition, but nothing could have induced her to have a coloured girl in her kitchen.  Her imaginations and prejudices were stained as white as her skin.  There was a lone man living on the outskirts of Fairbridge, in a little shack built by himself in the woods, who was said to have Indian blood in his veins, and Mrs. Sturtevant never saw him without that awful thrill of recoil.  When the little Orientals, men or women, swayed sidewise and bent with their cheap suitcases filled with Eastern handiwork, came to the door, she did not draw a long breath until she had watched them out of sight down the street.  It made no difference to her that they might be Christians, that they might have suffered persecution in their own land and sought our doorless entrances of hospitality; she still realised her own aloofness from them, or rather theirs from her.  They had entered existence entirely outside her chalk-line.  She and they walked on parallels which to all eternity could never meet.

It therefore came to pass that, although she had in the secret depths of her being bemoaned her childlessness, and had been conscious of yearnings and longings which were agonies, when Doctor Sturtevant, after the poor young unknown mother had been laid away in the Fairbridge cemetery, proposed that they should adopt the bereft little one, she rebelled.