Fanny Brewster dragged her child from her sister’s arms so forcibly that she seemed fairly to fly over the wheel.  Then she strained her to her hungry bosom, covering her with kisses, wetting her soft face and yellow hair with tears.

“My baby, mother’s darling, mother’s baby!” she gasped out with great pants of satisfied love; but another pair of lean, wiry old arms stole around the child’s slender body.

“Give her to me!” demanded Mrs. Zelotes Brewster.  “She is my son’s child, and I have a right to her!  You will kill her, goin’ on so over her.  Give her to me!  I have everything all ready in my house to take care of her.  Give her to me, Fanny Loud!”

“Keep your hands off her!” cried Fanny.  “She’s my own baby, and nobody’s goin’ to take her away from me, I guess.”

“Give her to me this minute!” said Mrs. Zelotes Brewster.  “You’ll kill her, goin’ on so.  You’re frightenin’ her to death.  Give her to me this minute!”

Ellen, meanwhile, that little tender blossom tossed helplessly by contending waves of love, was weeping and trembling with joy at the feel of her mother’s arms and with awe and terror at this tempest of passion which she had evoked.

“Give her to me!” demanded Mrs. Zelotes Brewster.

The crowd who had followed stood gaping with working faces.  The mothers wept over their own children.  Eva stood at her sister’s elbow, with a hand on one of the child’s, which was laid over Fanny’s shoulder.  Jim Tenny had his face hidden on his horse’s neck.

“Give her to me!” said Mrs. Zelotes again.  “Give her to me, I say!  I am her own grandmother!”

“And I am her own mother!” called out Fanny, with a great master-note of love and triumph and defiance.  “I’m her own mother, and I’ve got her, and nobody but God shall take her from me again.”  The tears streamed down her cheeks; she kissed the child with pale, parted lips.  She was at once pathetic and terrible.  She was human love and selfishness incarnate.

Mrs. Zelotes Brewster stared at her, and her face changed suddenly and softened.  She turned and went back into her own house.  Her gray head appeared a second beside her window, then sank out of sight.  She was kneeling there with her Bible at her side, a sudden sweet humility of thankfulness rising from her whole spirit like a perfume, when Fanny, with Eva following, still clinging to the child’s little hand over her sister’s shoulder, went across the yard to her own house to tell her husband.  The others followed, and stood about outside, listening with curiosity sanctified by intensest sympathy.  One nervous-faced boy leaped on the slant of the bulkhead to peer in a window of the sitting-room, and when his mother pulled him back forcibly, rubbed his grimy little knuckles across his eyes, and a dark smooch appeared on his nose and cheeks.  He was a young boy, very small and thin for his age.  He whispered to his mother and she nodded, and he darted off in the direction of his own home.