I'm sure I never suggested any such thing."

"We got the notion from above, Florence," explained Miss Fanny. "It was a direct command from our Heavenly Father. I had a vision."

"Your Aunt Fanny," proclaimed the elder sister, "dreamed she was nursing a white rabbit. Now, we have not eaten rabbits since, on an occasion when the Reverend Williams was taking a little supper with us, we unfortunately had a bad one—a high one. There had been nothing to suggest rabbits, let alone white rabbits, to your Aunt Fanny. So I said: 'Florence is going to have a baby. It must be a warning.' We consulted the Reverend Williams, who said it was very remarkable, and must mean the Almighty was calling upon us as he called upon the infant Samuel. We inquired first if either of your sisters was going to have a baby, also. Caroline Threadgale wrote an extremely rude letter, and Mabel Purkiss was even ruder. So, evidently, it is the will of God that we should adopt your baby girl. We prayed to Him to make it a little girl, because we are more familiar with little girls, never having had a brother and our father having died a good while ago now. Well, it is a girl. So plainly—oh, my dear niece, can't you see how plainly—God commands you to obey Him?"

Then Miss Horner stood up and looked so tall and severe that her niece was frightened for a moment, and half expected to see the flutter of an angel's wing over the foot of the bedstead. She nerved herself, however, to resist the will of Heaven.

"Dreaming of rabbits hasn't got nothing to do with babies. I forget what it does mean—burglars, or something, but not babies, and you sha'n't have Jenny."

"Think, my dear niece, before you refuse," Miss Horner remonstrated. "Think before you condemn your child to everlasting damnation, for nothing but the gates of Hell can come from denying the Heavenly Will. Think of your child growing up in wickedness and idle places, growing old in ignorance and contempt of God. Think of her dancing along the broad ways of Beelzebub, eating of the fruit of the forbidden tree, kissing and waltzing and making love and theater-going and riding outside omnibuses. Think of her journeying from vanity unto vanity and becoming a prey to evil and lascivious men. Remember the wily serpent who is waiting for her. Give her to us, that she may be washed in the blood of the Lamb, and crying Hallelujah, may have a harp in the Kingdom of Heaven.

"If you reject us," the old lady went on, her marble face taking on the lively hues of passion, her eyes on fire with the greatness of her message, "you reject God. Your daughter will go by ways you know not of; she will be lost in the mazes of destruction, she will fall in the pit of sin. She will be trampled under foot on the Day of Judgment, and be flung forever into wailing and gnashing of teeth. Her going out and coming in will be perilous. Her path will be set with snares of the giant of Iniquity. Listen to us, my dear niece, lest your child become a daughter of pleasure, a perpetual desire to the evil-minded. Give her us that we may keep her where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and no thieves break in and steal."

The old lady, exhausted by the force of her prophecy, sank down into the chair, and, elated by the splendors of the divine wrath, seemed indeed to be a noble and fervid messenger from God.

In Mrs. Raeburn, however, these denunciations wakened a feeling of resentment.

"Here," she cried, "are you cursing my Jenny?"

"We are warning you."

"Well, don't sit nodding there like three crows; your cursing will come to nothing, because you don't know nothing about London, nor about life, nor about nothing. What's the good of joring about the way to Heaven, when you don't know the way to Liverpool Street without asking a policeman? I say Jenny shall be happy. I say she shall be jolly and merry and laugh when she's a mind to, bless her, and never come to no harm with her mother to look after her. She sha'n't be a Plain Jane and No Nonsense, with her hair screwed back like a broom, but she shall be Jenny, sweet and handsome, with lips made for kissing and eyes that will sparkle and shine like six o'clock of a summer morning."

Mrs. Raeburn was sitting up in bed, holding high the unconscious infant.

"And she shall be happy, d'ye hear? And you sha'n't have her, so get out, and don't wag your bonnets at my Jenny."

The three aunts looked at each other.

"I see the footprints of Satan in this room," said Miss Horner.

"Not a bit of it," contradicted her niece. "It's your own muddy feet."

Outside, a German band, seduced from hibernation by St. Luke's summer, played the "March of the Priests" from "Athalie," leaving out the more important notes, and soon a jaded omnibus, with the nodding bonnets of the three Miss Horners, jogged slowly back to Clapton.

When the Miss Horners withdrew from the dingy bedroom the swish and rustle of their occupation, Mrs. Raeburn was at first relieved, afterwards indignant, finally anxious.

Could this strawberry-colored piece of womanhood beside her really be liable to such a life of danger and temptation and destruction? Could this wide-eyed stolidity ever become a spark to set men's hearts afire? Would those soft, uncrumpling hands know some day love's fever? No, no, her Jenny should be a home-bird—always a home-bird, and marry some nice young chap who could afford to give her a comfortable house where she could smile at children of her own, when the three old aunts had moldered away like dry sticks of lavender. All that babble of flames and hell was due to religion gone mad, to extravagant perusal of brass-bound Bibles, to sour virginity. With some perception of human weakness, Mrs. Raeburn began to realize that her aunts' heads were full of heated imaginations because they had never possessed an outlet in youth. The fierce adventures of passion had been withheld from them, and now, in old age, they were playing with fires that should have been extinguished long ago. Fancy living with those terrible old women at Clapton, hearing nothing but whispers of hell-fire. All that talk of looking after Jenny's soul was just telling the tale. There must be some scheme behind it all. Perhaps they wanted to save money in a servant, and thought to bring on Jenny by degrees to a condition of undignified utility.

Mrs. Raeburn was by no means a harsh judge of human nature, but her aunts having arrived at an unpropitious moment, she could not see their offer from a reasonable standpoint. Moreover, she had the proud woman's invariable suspicion of a gift; withal, there was a certain cynicism which made her say "presents weren't given for nothing in this world." Anyway, she decided, they were gone, and a good riddance, and she wouldn't ask them to Hagworth Street again in a hurry. The problem of getting in a woman to help now arose. Mrs. Nightman was off to-morrow; Alf and Ede would be back in a week, and Charlie's breakfast must be attended to. Mrs. Nightman informed her she knew where a likely girl of fifteen was to be found—a child warranted to be willing and clean and truthful. To-morrow, Mrs. Raeburn settled, this paragon must be interviewed.

To-morrow dawned, and in the wake of sunrise came the paragon. She still wore the dresses of childhood, but paid toll to responsibleness by screwing up her mouse-colored hair to the likeness of a cockle-shell, adding thereby, in her mother's estimation, eighteen months, in her own, ten years, to her age. She was a plum-faced child, with glazed cheeks. Her nose, Mrs. Raeburn observed with pleasure, did not drip like palings on a wet day. The paragon was just an ordinary old little girl, pitched into life with a pair of ill-fitting boots, a pinafore, and half a dozen hairpins. But she would do. Wait a minute. Was she inclined to loll or mouch? No. Was she bound to tilt a perambulator? No. Must she read light fiction when crossing a road? She didn't like reading.

Mrs.