“I know what for,” Julia smiled, as she watched the pink blanket out of sight.

A little later Mrs. Toland crept in, just for a kiss, and a whimpered, “And now you must forget all the pain, dear, and just be happy!”

Then Julia was left to her own thoughts.

She watched Miss Wheaton come and go in the soft twilight.  A shaded light bloomed suddenly, where it would not distress her eyes.  The curtains were drawn, and Ellie came softly in with a pitcher of hot milk on a tray.  Now and then the baby’s piercing little “Oo-wah-wah!” came in from the next room, and when she heard it, Julia smiled and said faintly, “The darling!”

And as a ship that has been blown seaward, to meet the gales and to be battered upon rocks, might be caught at last by friendlier tides and carried safely home, so Julia felt herself carried, a helpless little wreck, too tired to care if the waves flung her far up on shore or drew her out to their mad embraces again.

“All forgotten?” Miss Toland had asked, from her fifty years of ignorance, and “Now you must forget all the pain,” Mrs. Toland had said, with her motherly smile.

Queer, drifting thoughts came and went in her active brain during these quiet days of convalescence.  She thought of girls she had known at The Alexander, girls who had cried, and who had been blamed and ostracised, girls who had gone to the City and County Hospital for their bitter hour, and had afterward put the babies in the Asylum!  Julia’s thoughts went by the baby in the next room, and at the picture of that tender helplessness, wronged and abandoned, her heart seemed to close like a closing hand.

Anna Toland Studdiford would never be abandoned, no fear of that.  Never was baby more closely surrounded with love and the means of protection.  But the other babies, just as dear to other women, what of them?  What of mother hearts that must go through life knowing that there are little cries they will never hear, tears they may never dry, tired little bodies that will never know the restfulness of gentle arms?  The terrible sum of unnecessary human suffering rose up like a black cloud all about her; she seemed to see long hospital wards, with silent forms filling them day and night, night and day, the long years through; she had glimpses of the crowded homes of the poor, the sick and helpless mothers, the crying babies.  She suddenly knew sickness and helplessness to be two of the greatest factors in human life.

“What if Heaven is only this earth, clean and right at last,” mused Julia, “and Hell only the realization of what we might have done, and didn’t do—­for each other!” And to Jim she said, smiling, “This experience has not only given me a baby, and given me my own motherhood, but it seems to have given me all the mothers and the babies in the world as well!  I wish you were a baby doctor, Jim—­the preservation of babies is the most important thing in the world!”