"Isn't it too bad, too bad, too bad," I said. "Oh, Will!" I broke out, and began to cry.
Will came over and put his arms around me.
"Why, Bobbie dear," he said sadly, "I should think the little kiddie was yours."
I couldn't have been more disappointed if it had been. All the victorious telegrams, all the confident, buoyant notes to the different members of the family were more than useless now. The poor little mite of humanity wrapped up in a piece of flannel upstairs in the sewing-room in the clothes-basket, which Madge and I had lined with muslin, had shattered all my plans—had frustrated its poor little mother's only chance for glory.
It was all I could do to muster up a smile for poor, broken, beaten Madge herself, when the nurse ushered me into her bedroom the next day. I was glad when I saw her smiling up at me from the pillows that I had not confided my eager hopes to her.
"Oh, Lucy," she said to me, "it's a girl! I knew you hoped it would be a little girl, because you were so happy when Edith's baby came. And I—"
"Are you glad?" I asked tremblingly, feeling like a hypocrite before an angel.
"I—oh, I prayed for a girl. I wouldn't know what to do with a boy. My dolls were always girls."
It wasn't until I ran across Edith, most unexpectedly, several days later in town, that I woke up to the fact that that little girl of Madge's was a blessing in disguise. Edith's daughter was then about three months old and she was flitting about again as gay as ever, feathered and furred, stepping like a horse who has just had a good rub-down. I had seen her several times in the last month. She does all her shopping in Boston and I am often there myself. Of course we had spoken, even chatted on impersonal subjects as we chanced to meet here and there. On this particular day we happened to find ourselves in the drapery department of a large department store both waiting for the elevator to take us to the street.
"Oh, how do you do?" she said to me loftily. "Gorgeous day, isn't it?"