Esther selects some downy hand-embroidered silk and lace-fringed spreads. These replace those covering that besieged cot.
With tremulous content she takes a long, approving look at Bessie and extinguishes the light.
Straits of one self-banished outlaw are not dreamed of this night. Indefinite perils and unmerited gallows' menace to this interesting erstwhile suitor startle not love-loyal girlish fancy.
Little bruised feet, sunburnt face and hands, with straggling blond curls, usurp such function.
There is rustle of wings and happy smiling of familiar faces! The panorama concludes with vision of sleeping waif, upon love-beleaguered cot, illumined by mystic halo, and some high-browed watchers, gazing from child to maiden, uttering strangely significant speech about "one of the least of these."
Upon the next morning both Sir Donald and Esther rise late. Bessie still sleeps. With some doubt Esther leads her father to the cot. She is not quite sure about that quilt episode.
Sir Donald gazes at the child, and his eyes grow lustrous. Stooping down, he kisses the baby brow. Giving Esther a querulous smile, he returns to the library.
Weeks have passed since the arrival of Bessie at Northfield. Sir Donald made conscientious inquiry for "Granny." No one knows the child's antecedents. Bessie can furnish no clearer clews to her identity. She is happy in her new home. Many little surprises for the pleasure of Bessie are planned by the generous Esther. Interest in childish whims is so genuine as to check pensive, abstracted moods. These ministrations revive drooping spirits. Bessie's eccentricities become Northfield household tonic.
Commenting on this change to Esther, Sir Donald says: "Relaxed emotional tension and less concentrated musings permit more hopeful view and brighter horoscope. I now feel greatly relieved. This generous disposition of yours I now regard as acme of human dower. Its Paris and Calcutta whims once seemed pretty symptoms of harmless infatuation. I am now impressed with the mystic coherence of detached coincidents. There is ever-widening horizon to that which 'cometh without observation.'"