“May God have mercy upon—­the child!” was what she said, and by those words she took her stand between past wrong and hope of future justice.  “You must take this child, Doris,” she said.  “All that you know and feel but make the course imperative and inevitable.”

“Sister, how can I—­feeling as I do?”

“Can you afford not to?  Can you leave it—­to such a man?”

“But, Sister, you do not know him.  If I should conquer my aversion and take the child, if I succeeded in loving it—­he would bide his time and claim it.  The law that made this horrible thing possible covers his claim to the child.”

Angela drooped back in her chair.  She looked old and beaten.

“He must not have the child,” she murmured.  “It’s the only chance for the salvation of Meredith’s little girl.  He shall not have it!”

Doris bent toward the fire holding her cold, clasped hands to the heat.  Suddenly she turned.

“I am growing nervous,” she said, “I thought I heard someone pressing against the window—­I thought I saw—­a shadow drift outside in the moonlight.”

Angela started and sat upright.  Every sense was alert—­she was remembering her promise to old Becky!

“I wish,” she said, haltingly, “I wish I had consulted Father Noble.  I have undertaken too much.”

“Consulted him about what, Sister?” Doris was touched by the quivering voice and strained eyes; she set her own trouble aside.

Again that pressing sound, and the wind swirling the dead leaves against the house.

“About a little deserted mountain child upstairs.  I have promised to find a home for it, but I cannot manage such things any more—­I am too old.”

The words came plaintively, as if defending against implied neglect.

Doris’s eyes grew deep and concerned.

“A deserted child?” she repeated.  In the feverish haste and trouble of the past few days the ordinary life of Ridge House had held no part.  It seemed to be claiming its rights now, pushing her aside.

Then Sister Angela, her tired face set toward the long window whence came that pressing sound and the swish of the wind, told Becky’s story.  She told it as she might if Becky were listening, ready at any lapse to correct her, but she carefully refrained from mentioning names.

It eased her mind to turn from Doris’s trouble to poor Becky’s, and she saw with relief that Doris was listening; was interested.

“It is strange,” Sister Angela mused, when the bare telling of the story was over, “how the deep, cruel things in life are met by people in much the same way—­the ignorant and the wise, when they touch the inscrutable they let go and turn to a higher power than their own.  Meredith felt that her child’s chance in life lay in a new and fresh start.  The mountain woman’s curse, as she termed it, could only be conquered, so she pleaded, by giving her grandchild to those who did not know.  It amounts to the same thing.