"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."