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“Is thee alone?” inquired the old man.

“Yes. That is–only Baby. My husband has just–just”–her voice fluttered and died away helplessly.

“Oh, thee’s a widow,” said Enoch gently.

“Yes.” The poor young thing looked up with a smile of wistful gratitude. “I’m not very strong. I heard this was a healthy place. They thought it would be good for us–Baby and me. I’m Mrs. Josie Hart. Baby’s name is Gerald.”

“Would thee be afraid to stay in a house alone?” inquired Enoch thoughtfully.

The stranger gave him a look of gentle surprise.

“Why, no, of course not–not with Baby; he’s so much company.”

There was a note of profound compassion for his masculine ignorance in her young voice.

The old man’s mouth quivered into a smile. He went to the back of the room, and took a key from a nail.

“I think I can find thee a real cosy little place,” he said; “shan’t I carry the baby for thee?”

She hesitated, and looked up into his solemn, kindly face. Then she held the precious bundle toward him.

“I guess I’ll have to let you. I didn’t really know it till I got here, but I begin to feel, oh! so awful tired,” she said, with a long, sighing breath, as Enoch folded his gaunt arms about the baby.

They went up the street together, and Enoch unlocked Jerry’s house and showed the stranger in. She walked straight across the room to the cradle. When she turned around her eyes were swimming.

“Oh, I think it’s just lovely here,” she said; “I feel better already. This is such a nice little house, and so many wild flowers everywhere, and they smell so sweet–I know Baby will like it.”

She relieved Enoch of his burden and laid it on the bed.

The old man lingered a little.

“Thee needn’t worry about provisions or anything,” he said hesitatingly; “some of the neighbors will come in and help thee get started. Thee’ll want to rest now. I guess I’ll be going.”

“Oh, you mustn’t go without seeing Baby!” insisted the young mother, beginning to unswathe the shapeless bundle on the bed.

Enoch moved nearer, and waited until the tiny crumpled bud of a face appeared among the wrappings.

” Isn’t he sweet?” pleaded the girl rapturously.

Enoch bent over and gazed into the quaint little sleeping countenance.

“He’s a very nice baby,” he said, with gentle emphasis.

“And so good,” the girl-voice rippled on; “he never cried but once on the way out here, and that time I didn’t blame him one bit; I wanted to cry myself,–we were so hot and tired and dusty. But he sleeps–oh, the way he does sleep. There! did you notice him smile? I think he knows my voice. He often smiles that way when I am talking to him.”

She caught him out of his loosened sheath and held him against her breast with the look on her face that has baffled the art of so many centuries.

It was thus that Enoch remembered her as he went down the street to the store.

“I would have taken her right home to Rachel,” he said to himself, “but women folks sometimes ask a good many unnecessary questions, and the poor thing is tired.”

V.

So the little widow and her baby became the wards of the town of Muscatel. After one or two unsuccessful attempts to learn the particulars of her husband’s last illness, the good women of the place decided that her bereavement was too recent to be made a subject of conversation.

The baby, on the contrary, being a topic all the more absorbing by reason of its newness, they held long and enthusiastic conferences with the young mother concerning his care, clothing, and diet. With that gentle receptivity which makes some natures the defenseless targets of advice, the inefficient little mother felt herself at times between the upper and the nether millstones of condensed milk and Caudle’s food, but her weak, appealing face always brightened into tremulous delight when the rival factions united, as they invariably did, on the subject of the baby’s undoubted precocity in the matter of “noticing.”