"But you must n't cry, Freddie; an', some day, you kin go an' see mamma."
The child's curiosity got the better of his grief. He asked, "Is heaven far, Mis' Davis?"
"Yes, dear, awful far," she answered. But she was wrong. Heaven is not far from the warm heart and tender hands of a good woman.
The child's head drooped, and he drowsed in her arms.
"Put him to bed, Melissy,—pore little fellow," said her husband in husky tones. He had been listening and watching them around the edge of his paper. The child slept on, while the woman undressed him and laid him in the bed.
On the morrow the women dropped in one by one, until a half-dozen or more were there, to plan the boy's future. They were all poor, and most of them had families of their own. But all hoped that there might be some plan devised whereby Margaret's boy might find a refuge without going to the orphans' asylum, an institution which is the
detestation of women. Mrs. Davis, in expressing her feelings, expressed those of all the others: "I hate so to think of the pore little feller goin' to one o' them childern's homes. The boys goin' around in them there drab clothes o' theirs allus look like pris'ners to me, an' they ain't much better off."
"An' then childern do learn so much weekedness in them places from the older ones," put in another.
"Oh, as fur that matter, he 'll learn devilment soon enough anywhere," snapped Mrs. Warren, "with that owdacious father o' his before him. I would n't take the child by no means, though his mother an' me was friends, fur blood 's bound to tell, an' with sich blood as he 's got in him I don't know what he 'll come to, an' I 'm shore I don't want to be a-raisin' no gallus-birds."
The women felt rather relieved that Mrs. Warren so signally washed her hands of Freddie. That was one danger he had escaped. The woman in question had, as she said, been a close friend of Margaret's, and, as such, an aider in her habits of intemperance. It had been apprehended that her association with the mother might lead her to take the child.