Mally shook her head, but answered quietly:—
“I have never felt before like this, but only God knows. But this is why I sent for you: If my little baby lives, and is a perfect child, and I am taken away, would you, Anna, do you think you could—take my baby for your own, for always?”
“Oh, if I could!” and all Anna’s heart went out in the cry, and Mally saw the love which shone in her eyes and wondered at her strange beauty.
“I am sure you will come through safely as you have before,” she said, “but this I promise you, Mally,” taking her friend’s hand and holding it fast, “if you should be taken from your children, and they will let me,—I mean if my husband and his mother should consent, for I am not quite free, you see,—I will take your little baby and it shall be my very own, and I will be its mother while we both live, God helping me.”
A look of deep joy and relief in Mally’s poor pale face was full response, and the two parted with a sense of a deeper union of spirit than they had ever known before.
Early on the following morning, after a wakeful and anxious night, Anna hastened to the Nicholses’ home.
Mally’s husband met her with a stricken face, for a swift and sudden blow had fallen; her trial had come and his wife had died, hardly an hour before. There had been no time to send for Anna, although Mally had spoken her name almost at the last.
They stood together in the poor, gay little parlour which Mally had adorned with high hopes of the abundant life into which she fancied herself entering,—the young husband with his grief-wrung, ashy face, Anna with her heart melted in sorrow and compassion. While neither could speak for their tears, the faint wail of a little child smote upon the silence from a room within.
“The baby?” Anna asked under her breath.
A deeper darkness seemed to settle upon Nichols’s face.