Edward and Annie led the same gay child-like lives after their marriage that they had led before:  they looked even younger and gayer and sunnier.  When they dashed cantering through the river meadows, she with rosy cheeks and pale brown curls flying in the wind, and he with close crisp black hair, and the rich, dark, glowing skin of a Spaniard, the farming men turned and rested on their tools, and gazed till they were out of sight.  Sometimes I asked myself wonderingly, “Are they ever still, and tender, and silent?” “Is this perpetual overflow the whole of love?” But it seemed treason to doubt in the presence of such merry gladness as shone in Annie’s face, and in her husband’s too.  It was simply the incarnate triumph and joy of young life.

The summer went by; the chrysanthemums bloomed out white and full in my garden; the frosts came, and then the winter, and then Annie told me one day that before winter came again she would be a mother.  She was a little sobered as she saw the intense look on my face.

“Why, darling, aren’t you glad?  I thought you would be almost as glad as I am myself?” Annie sometimes misunderstood me now.

“Glad!  O Annie,” was all I could say.

From that day I had but one thought, Annie’s baby.  Together we wrought all dainty marvels for its ward-robe; together we planned all possible events in its life:  from the outset I felt as much motherhood to the precious little unseen one as Annie did.  She used to say to me, often,—­

“Darling, it will be half my baby, and half yours.”

Annie was absolutely and gloriously well through the whole of those mysterious first months of maternity which are to so many women exhausting and painful.  Every nerve of her body seemed strung and attuned to normal and perfect harmony.  She was more beautiful than ever, stronger than ever, and so glad that she smiled perpetually without knowing it.  For the first time since the old days, dear Dr. Fearing’s face lost the anxious look with which his eyes always rested upon her.  He was more at ease about her now.

Before light one Sunday morning in December, a messenger rang furiously at our bell.  We had been looking for such tidings and were not alarmed.  It was a fearful storm; wind and sleet and rain and darkness had attended the coming of Annie’s little “Sunday child” into its human life.

“A boy—­and Miss Annie’s all right,” old Caesar said, with a voice almost as hoarse as the storm outside; and he was gone before we could ask a question farther.

In less than an hour I stood on the threshold of Annie’s room.  But I did not see her until noon.  Then, as I crept softly into the dimly-lighted chamber, the whole scene so recalled her illness of two years before that my heart stood still with sudden horror, in spite of all my joy.  Now, as then, I knelt silently at her bedside, and saw the sweet face lying white and still on the pillow.