CHAPTER XLI

In her bed in the maternity ward Edith at first lay through the days, watching the other women with their babies, and wondering over the strange instinct that made them hover, like queer mis-shaped ministering angels, over the tiny quivering bundles.  Some of them were like herself, or herself as she might have been, bearing their children out of wedlock.  Yet they faced their indefinite futures impassively, content in relief from pain, in the child in their arms, in present peace and security.  She could not understand.

She herself felt no sense of loss.  Having never held her child in her arms she did not feel them empty.

She had not been told of her mother’s death; men were not admitted to the ward, but early on that first morning, when she lay there, hardly conscious but in an ecstasy of relief from pain, Ellen had come.  A tired Ellen with circles around her eyes, and a bag of oranges in her arms.

“How do you feel?” she had asked, sitting down self-consciously beside the bed.  The ward had its eyes on her.

“I’m weak, but I’m all right.  Last night was awful, Ellen.”

She had roused herself with an effort.  Ellen reminded her of something, something that had to do with Willy Cameron.  Then she remembered, and tried to raise herself in the bed.

“Willy!” she gasped.  “Did he come home?  Is he all right?”

“He’s all right.  It was him that found you were here.  You lie back now; the nurse is looking.”

Edith lay down and closed her eyes, and the ecstasy of relief and peace gave to her pale face an almost spiritual look.  Ellen saw it, and patted her arm with a roughened hand.

“You poor thing!” she said.  “I’ve been as mean to you as I knew how to be.  I’m going to be different, Edith.  I’m just a cross old maid, and I guess I didn’t understand.”

“You’ve been all right,” Edith said.

Ellen kissed her when she went away.

So for three days Edith lay and rested.  She felt that God had been very good to her, and she began to think of God as having given her another chance.  This time He had let her off, but He had given her a warning.  He had said, in effect, that if she lived straight and thought straight from now on He would forget this thing she had done.  But if she did not—­

Then what about Willy Cameron?  Did He mean her to hold him to that now?  Willy did not love her.  Perhaps he would grow to love her, but she was seeing things more clearly than she had before, and one of the things she saw was that Willy Cameron was a one-woman man, and that she was not the woman.

“But I love him so,” she would cry to herself.

The ward moved in its orderly routine around her.  The babies were carried out, bathed and brought back, their nuzzling mouths open for the waiting mother-breast.  The nurses moved about, efficient, kindly, whimsically maternal.  Women went out when their hour came, swollen of feature and figure, and were wheeled back later on, etherealized, purified as by fire, and later on were given their babies.  Their faces were queer then, frightened and proud at first, and later watchful and tenderly brooding.