“Maybe it was God that took the baby back. He has solved our problem. If the poor little thing had lived—think! But now! It’s too bad, but—well, Immy’s a girl again. And nobody knows, nobody knows! Nobody need ever know.”
But they were not rid of the baby yet. It waited on the sill of their decision. Its body, built in secret with so much mystic care and borne with such agony, was empty, but as inescapable as an abandoned house.
The little house must be removed from the landscape it dominated, before the neighbors grew aware of its presence.
While RoBards dully tried to set his thought-machinery going, Patty murmured:
“I’ll have to tell Immy. She is too weak to wonder yet. She’ll carry on terribly, but it can’t be helped. And she’ll be glad all the rest of her days. But where shall we—what can we do with the baby now?”
“Huh?” gasped RoBards. “Oh, yes, what can we do with the—yes, that is the question, what can we do? We’ve got to do something.”
But that could wait. Immy was faintly moaning, “Mamma! Mamma!” Patty ran to her. RoBards followed and bent to kiss the wrung-out wisp that had survived the long travail. She whispered feebly: “Where’s my baby? I haven’t even seen it yet. Is it a boy or——”
Patty knelt and caressed her and asked her to be brave. Then, in order to have done with the horror, told it to her in the fewest words.
Immy gave back the ghost of a shriek in protest against this miserable reward of all her shame and all the rending of her soul and body. She wanted to hold her achievement in her arms. She wanted to feel its little mouth nuzzling her flesh, drawing away that first clotted ache. Nature demanded that the child take up its offices in her behalf no less than its own. Thousands of years of habit clamored in her flesh.
No one could say how much was love and how much was strangled instinct. But she was frantic. She whispered Murder! and kept maundering as she rocked her head sidewise, trying vainly to lift her weak hands in battle: