“And Jane is coming home alone?”

“No, she brings a little child with her, the son of a friend, she writes.  She asks that I arrange to have Martha meet them at the dock.”

“Somebody, I suppose, she has picked up out of the streets.  She is always doing these wild, unpractical things.  Whose child is it?”

“She doesn’t say, but I quite agree with you that it was helpless, or she wouldn’t have protected it.”

“Why don’t Lucy come with her?”

The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

“And I suppose you will go to the ship to meet her?”

The doctor drew himself up, clicked his heels together with the air of an officer saluting his superior —­really to hide his joy—­and said with mock gravity, his hand on his heart: 

“I shall, most honorable mother, be the first to take her ladyship’s hand as she walks down the gangplank.”  Then he added, with a tone of mild reproof in his voice:  “What a funny, queer old mother you are!  Always worrying yourself over the unimportant and the impossible,” and stooping down, he kissed her again on the cheek and passed out of the room on the way to his office.

“That woman always comes up at the wrong moment,” Mrs. Cavendish said to herself in a bitter tone.  “I knew he had received some word from her, I saw it in his face.  He would have gone to Philadelphia but for Jane Cobden.”

CHAPTER IX

THE SPREAD OF FIRE

The doctor kept his word.  His hand was the first that touched Jane’s when she came down the gangplank, Martha beside him, holding out her arms for the child, cuddling it to her bosom, wrapping her shawl about it as if to protect it from the gaze of the inquisitive.

“O doctor! it was so good of you!” were Jane’s first words.  It hurt her to call him thus, but she wanted to establish the new relation clearly.  She had shouldered her cross and must bear its weight alone and in her own way.  “You don’t know what it is to see a face from home!  I am so glad to get here.  But you should not have left your people; I wrote Martha and told her so.  All I wanted you to do was to have her meet me here.  Thank you, dear friend, for coming.”

She had not let go his hand, clinging to him as a timid woman in crossing a narrow bridge spanning an abyss clings to the strong arm of a man.

He helped her to the dock as tenderly as if she had been a child; asking her if the voyage had been a rough one, whether she had been ill in her berth, and whether she had taken care of the baby herself, and why she had brought no nurse with her.  She saw his meaning, but she did not explain her weakness or offer any explanation of the cause of her appearance or of the absence of a nurse.  In a moment she changed the subject, asking after his mother and his own work, and seemed interested in what he told her about the neighbors.