"
Two long quiet weeks of this happiness, and then in a twinkling it was
gone. The child fell sick, within a few hours its small existence hung by a
thread--and to Roger's startled eyes a new Deborah was revealed! Tense and
silent on her bed, her sensitive lips compressed with pain, her birthmark
showing a jagged line of fiery red upon her brow as her ears kept straining
to catch every sound from the nursery adjoining, through hours of stern
anguish she became the kind of mother that she had once so
dreaded--shutting out everything else in the world: people, schools, all
other children, rich or poor, well, sick or dying! Here was the crisis of
Deborah's life!
One night as she lay listening, with her hand gripping Roger's tight,
frowning abruptly she said to him, in a harsh, unnatural voice:
"They don't care any longer, none of them care! _I'm_ safe and they've
stopped worrying, for they know they'll soon have me back at work! The
work," she added fiercely, "that made my body what it is, not fit to bear a
baby!" She threw a quick and tortured look toward the door of the other
room. "My work for those others, all those years, will be to blame if this
one dies! And if it doesn't live I'm through! I won't go on! I couldn't!
I'd be too bitter after this--toward all of them--_those children_!"
These last two words were whispers so bitter they made Roger cold.
"But this child is going to live," he responded hoarsely.
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