“You are so good toward me!” she said in broken English. “You make so much trouble for me!”
Then she stroked the little socks. “Wie niedlich! Wie reizend!”
We talked for some time in bad English and worse German. When at last I rose to go, Mrs. Ebstein took both my hands again.
“I did not know,” she said, “but you are so good,—and I am ganz allein! No sister, keine Mutter. Will you come mit the doctor-lady when she comes?”
And smiling to see into what strange paths my endeavour to serve humanity was leading me, I promised. She was so young; she was so far away from home.
Her child was born on the night of the twenty-sixth of December. I went down in the afternoon with the Doctor; and all night long I waited and watched, in the outer room, from which the seven children had been banished.
The Doctor and the district nurse cared for the patient.
Sitting out by the fire, I hung the little flannel robes again and again in the warmest place, saying over and over the lines of the folk-song:—
“Mine ear is full of the murmur of rocking cradles.
‘For a single cradle,’ saith Nature, ‘I would give every one of my graves.’”