"Now, what do you think o' that!" Martha said mournfully, and the two uniformed ones never knew that, in her heart, she despised them, "and their mizrable Bildadin' talk, which nobody could stand up against it, anyhow, much less a innocent little lamb that hasn't the stren'th to call'm liars to their faces."
"O' course we'll raise her," she assured Mr. Ronald confidently. "There's no doubt about it. Yes, I know she ain't very hefty, an' she ain't very robustic. But what do you expec'? You ain't give her a fair show yet. You can't take a baby, a few weeks old, 'specially if it had the tough time gettin' in on the game at all, that this one had, an' expec' her to be as big an' husky as my Sabina. It wouldn't be sensible. Besides, look at her mother! Miss Claire's no giantess, nor ever was, but she's as sound as a nut, an' so'll the baby be, when she gets her gait on, an' knows it's up to her to keep in step with the percession. Don't you let nobody discourage you. Believin's half the battle. You can take it from me, that baby's goin' to live, an' thrive, like the little thorabred she is. She wouldn't give us all this trouble for nothin'."
Her invincible confidence was like a tonic to Francis Ronald. It reinforced his own more flickering faith, so he could meet Claire's hungrily questioning eyes with reassurance.
And, as the weeks went by, Martha's prediction seemed less and less preposterous.
"Didn't I tell you?" she exulted. "That baby's a winner! She's goin' to be standard weight, all right, all right, an' measure up to requirements too, give her time. But between you an' me, all this new-fangled business with scales, an' tape-measures, an' suchlike, is enough to discourage the best-intentioned infant. There's more notions, nowadays, than you can shake a stick at—an' I'd like to shake a stick at most of'm, believe me!"
At the time, she was thinking rather more of Miss Crewe, than of the nurses, whose "queer fandangoes" she never could become reconciled to.
She was frankly anxious about Katherine.
"If I could do with her, like I do with Buller, I wouldn't say a word," she ruminated. "I just keep a kinda gener'l line on him, an' when the time comes, I get a-holt of his collar-band, an' march'm up to the captain's office, as brave as a lion. He's got so the minute I tip'm the wink, he comes for his washin' an' ironin'—I should say, bandidgin', as meek as a lamb to the slaughterhouse. But you can take it from me, there's no gettin' a line on Miss Katherine. She's devotin' all her time an' attention to puttin' off flesh an' color. The trouble is, she's got nothin' to do, an' she does it so thora, she ain't got time for anything else. Dear me! I wisht I could sort o' set her an' Buller at each other. It might help'm both to forget their losses. He certaintly is a queer dick, an' no mistake!"
"In spite o' his sportin' a G.A.R. one, you can take it from me, Buller ain't got all his buttons!" she told Miss Katherine. "Do you know what he says? He says everybody's gone back on'm because he's in trouble. He says, nobody'll look at'm now he's mangled. They was his friends before, when he had all the limbs was comin' to'm, but—now he's shy a hand—they're too proud to notice'm. He says the world's a hard place for cripples."
A faint smile flitted across Katherine's face