grandson. Silently I sat with her sewing by the hour on her meagre little outfit of five nainsook slips, three flannel Gertrudes, two bands, two shirts, and three flannellette night-gowns, with never a word of my eager thoughts. I became very loyal to the cause I had chosen to defend. It didn't trouble me that our little baby-clothes were so much plainer than Edith's, for night and day, day and night, I was hoping against hope, wishing against chance, willing and frantically demanding that Madge's splendour might lie in her victory.
You can imagine the ecstatic state of excitement I was thrown into when the news of the arrival of Edith's nine-pound daughter reached me some six weeks after my last visit to Hilton.
I must have felt a good deal like the supporters of a weaker foot-ball team when their side makes the first touchdown. I could have thrown up my hat with joy; I could have shouted myself hoarse. Madge had an opportunity! Madge had a chance! It seemed too good to be true, and I longed to share with Madge the triumph so nearly hers. But Will was afraid she might worry and fret about it,—there was, of course, the possibility of disappointment,—so I followed his advice and kept on building my air-castles in secret.
It was on November twenty-first that Madge's little child was born. We had written to Oliver in June and he had started on his homeward journey as soon as Madge's belated letter reached him, some time in August. He had tramped a hundred miles down a tropical river, had lain sick for five weeks with a fever in a native camp, had dragged himself
