She met Linda at the door, a weary Linda, ghastly as to face, grayer as to straggling hair, but with such radiance in her eyes that Harriet, clasped in her arms, began to cry again.

“What you need is coffee!” she faltered, trying to laugh, as Linda sat down and rested her head in her hands.

“Oh, Harriet—­if I can ever thank God enough!” Pip’s mother said, beginning on her breakfast with one long sigh.  “Oh, my dear—!  He’s sleeping like a baby, God bless him, and dear old Fred is sleeping, too.  Oh, Harriet, to go about the house, as I just have, covering Nammy and the girls, and feeling that we’re all going to be together again, in a few days—­my dear, I don’t know what I’ve done to be so blessed!  My boy, who has never given any one one moment’s care or trouble since he was born—­my darling, who looked up at me yesterday with his beautiful eyes—­”

The floodgates were loosed, and Linda laughed and cried, while she enjoyed her breakfast with the appetite of a normal woman released from cruel strain, whose whole brood lies safely sleeping under her roof.  Nammy’s light illness, Pip’s wet feet, Linda’s unwillingness to believe that it was anything but a cold, every hour of the four awful days of danger, she reviewed them all.  And oh, the goodness of people, the solicitude of nurse and doctor, the generosity of God!

“Fred has been a miracle,” said Linda, with her third cup of coffee, “this will cost him five hundred dollars, but Harriet, I’ll never forget the way his voice rang out yesterday, ’I don’t want you to think of anything but giving me back my boy!’ And Harriet, only ten days ago—­it seems ten years—­I felt so terribly, I acted so terribly, about that old house that I’ve been wanting so long!  They sold it at auction, and the Paysons got it for forty-three hundred, and I was perfectly sick that Fred wouldn’t bid!  But now,” said Linda, reverently, putting her arm about Josephine, who came yawning into the kitchen, in her blue wrapper, “now, if the Father spares me my girls and boys, and their daddy, I shall never ask anything happier than this!  Pip’s better, Jo,” she said to the child, who was kissing her dreamily, over and over, “they put a tube in his throat last night, and saved him for us!  And now Mother must get a bath, and change, and perhaps some sleep, and then go back and stay with him when he wakes up!” It was the afternoon of the next day when Harriet could first speak of her own affairs.  Pip, recuperating with the amazing speed of childhood, was asleep, the other children walking, the nurse gone.  She could lay the whole matter before Linda, who listened, over her mending, nodded, pursed her lips, or raised her eyebrows.

If Linda might ever have been worldly minded, she had had her lesson now, and the viewpoint she gave Harriet was the lofty one of a woman who has faced a supreme sacrifice without shrinking and with unwavering faith.

“You did right, dear,” she assured her sister.  “You could not stay there, under the circumstances.  Whatever their code is, yours is different, yours has not been vitiated by luxury and idleness.  As for Mr. Carter’s talk of marriage, that, of course, is simply an insult!”