Kate and Adam mourned too deeply to talk about it.  They went about their daily rounds silently, each busy with regrets and self investigations.  They watched each other carefully, were kinder than they ever had been to everyone they came in contact with; the baby they frankly adored.  Kate had reared her own children with small misgivings, quite casually, in fact; but her heart was torn to the depths about this baby.  Life never would be even what it had been before Polly left them, for into her going there entered an element of self-reproach and continual self-condemnation.  Adam felt that if he had been less occupied with Milly York and had taken proper care of his sister, he would not have lost her.  Kate had less time for recrimination, because she had the baby.

“Look for a good man to help you this summer, Adam,” she said.  “The baby is full of poison which can be eliminated only slowly.  If I don’t get it out before teething, I’ll lose her, and then we never shall hear the last from the Peters family.”  Adam consigned the Peters family to a location he thought suitable for them on the instant.  He spoke with unusual bitterness, because he had heard that the Peters family were telling that Polly had grieved herself to death, while his mother had engineered a scheme whereby she had stolen the baby.  Occasionally a word drifted to Kate here and there, until she realized much of what they were saying.  At first she grieved too deeply to pay any attention, but as the summer went on and the baby flourished and grew fine and strong, and she had time in the garden, she began to feel better; grief began to wear away, as it always does.

By midsummer the baby was in short clothes, sitting in a high chair, which if Miss Baby only had known it, was a throne before which knelt her two adoring subjects.  Polly had said the baby would be like Kate.  Its hair and colouring were like hers, but it had the brown eyes of its father, and enough of his facial lines to tone down the too generous Bates features.  When the baby was five months old it was too pretty for adequate description.  One baby has no business with perfect features, a mop of curly, yellow silk hair, and big brown eyes.  One of the questions Kate and Adam discussed most frequently was where they would send her to college, while one they did not discuss was how sick her stomach teeth would make her.  They merely lived in mortal dread of that.  “Convulsion,” was a word that held a terror for Kate above any other in the medical books.

The baby had a good, formal name, but no one ever used it.  Adam, on first lifting the blanket, had fancied the child resembled its mother and had called her “Little Poll.”  The name clung to her.  Kate could not call such a tiny morsel either Kate or Katherine; she liked “Little Poll,” better.  The baby had three regular visitors.  One was her father.  He was not fond of Kate; Little Poll suited him.  He expressed