“Oh, my baby! my baby! my boy! my boy! Bless God! thank God! oh, my baby!”
Startled by this sudden outcry, the resident physician and two nurses who were in the ward hurried down the room to see what it meant. Edith had the child hugged tightly to her bosom, and resisted all their efforts to remove him.
“My dear madam,” said the doctor, “you will do him some harm if you don't take care.”
“Hurt my baby? Oh no, no!” she answered, relaxing her hold and gazing down upon Andy as she let him fall away from her bosom. Then lifting her eyes to the physician, her face so flooded with love and inexpressible joy that it seemed like some heavenly transfiguration, she murmured, in a low voice full of the deepest tenderness,
“Oh no. I will not do my baby any harm.”
“My dear, dear friend,” said Mrs. Morton, recovering from the shock of her first surprise and fearing that Edith had suddenly lost her mind, “you cannot mean what you say;” and she reached down for the child and made a movement as if she were going to lift him away from her arms.
A look of angry resistance swept across Edith's pale face. There was a flash of defiance in her eyes.
“No, no! You must not touch him,” she exclaimed; “I will die before giving him up. My baby!”
And now, breaking down from her intense excitement, she bent over the child again, weeping and sobbing. Waiting until this paroxysm had expended itself, Mrs. Morton, who had not failed to notice that Andy never turned his eyes for an instant away from Edith, nor resisted her strained clasp or wild caresses, but lay passive against her with a look of rest and peace in his face, said,
“How shall we know that he is your baby?”