The summer sun was warm in the five-acre lot, and the east porch was cool and pleasant, so the owner of the lot lingered in the porch and talked awhile with his wife. He had married her only the April before, and to live with her and love her had not yet grown to be an old story. It would be her fault if it ever did grow to be one; for he was a tender, kindly man, this Marcus Grant, with a gentle and clinging nature, and a womanly need of loving.  
His wife, though she was young and pretty, with bright eyes, and bright lips, and soft, waving hair, was harder than he, and colder, and more selfish. But she had given him all the heart she had, and in these early days she cared very much indeed about pleasing him, and keeping him satisfied with her; or, rather, making[Pg 160] him continue to admire her, for quiet satisfaction on his part would not have been enough.
 
He had thrown himself down on the door-stone, and his head was leaning against her lap, as she sat on her low chair in the porch, and ran her fingers in and out of his thick chestnut hair, thinking to herself what a fortunate woman she was to be the wife of this manly, handsome fellow, whom so many girls wanted, and the mistress of his well-filled, comfortable house.
 
From this east porch where they sat they could see down the long line of dusty road that led to the church and the few houses clustered round it, which passed for a village. The farmhouse stood on the top of a high hill; and up this hill they now saw a woman toiling slowly. The summer sun burned fiercely down on her, the dust rose with every step in a choking cloud about her, but still she struggled on.
 
Little events are full of interest in country solitudes, and both Grant and his wife watched the wanderer with curiosity.
 
"Well, I never saw her before, that's certain,"[Pg 161] the husband said, after a long look as she drew nearer.
 
"Nor I," returned his wife. "But see, Mark, she has a baby in her arms. She's trying to keep the sun off it with that shawl; and, sure as you live, she is turning in here."
 
"Why, so she is;" and Grant rose to his feet.
 
"May I sit down in the shade and rest?" asked the stranger, drawing nigh. She spoke in a clear, silvery voice, which betrayed some of her secrets, since it was the voice of a lady, and also it was the utterance of despair, for its hopeless monotone was unvarying.
 
"Certainly," and Mrs. Grant rose and offered her own low chair, for clearly this was no common tramp.
 
"And might I trouble you for a glass of water?"
 
"I'll go for some fresh," Grant said, full of hospitable intent.
 
But before he got back with the water he heard his wife calling him, and hurrying forward at the sound, he found her holding the stranger's[Pg 162] head, on her shoulder, and the baby, who was just opening sleepy eyes, in her arms.
 
"Quick, Mark, do something. I think she is dying. She must be sun-struck."
 
And so it proved. No one ever knew how far she had toiled in that intense heat, with the baby in her arms,—no one ever knew any thing more about her, for when the sun set, which had scorched and withered her life, she, too, was gone to unknown shores. She spoke only once after she asked for the glass of water, and that was just before she died. The baby, in another room, uttered a cry, and she tried to turn her head toward the sound.
 
"It is your baby," Mrs. Grant said, kindly, "but she is all right. What do you call her?"
 
The strangest change came over the dying face: it may have been only a foreshadowing of death, but it seemed more like a mortal agony of renunciation and of despair.
 
"Nothing," she said, as evenly and with as little change of inflection as if she were already a ghost; "nothing: she is nobody's child."
 
[Pg 163]
 
But in half an hour after that she was dead, and Mrs. Grant, who was very literal in her ideas, always thought that the stranger had not known what she said; but, she used to add, the child was nobody's child, for all they should ever know about it.
 
After the mother was buried, she began to think it was time to dispose of this child, which was nobody's. She was not without heart, and she had worked diligently to fashion small garments enough to make the little creature comfortable; but now, she thought, her duty was done, and she wondered Mark said nothing about taking the baby to the alms-house.
 
At last, one evening, she herself proposed it. Her husband looked at her in mild surprise. He supposed all women loved babies by instinct, and he took it for granted that of course his wife wanted this one, only she probably thought he wouldn't like it round.
 
"Why, did you think I wouldn't let you keep it?" he asked quietly. "I think God has sent it to us, and we've really no right to turn it over[Pg 164] to any one else, to say nothing of the pleasure it is to have the little bundle."
 
As I said, Mrs. Grant was still in a state of mind not to be satisfied without her husband's admiration. She would not have fallen short of his ideal of her for any thing; she would, at least, seem all that he desired her to be. She was quick enough to understand that he would think less of her if he saw her unwilling to keep the baby, so she smiled on him with what cheerfulness she could summon, and treated the matter as settled.
 
Thus the child, which was nobody's, grew up in the Grant household. She had been six months old, apparently, when she came there, and by midwinter she began to totter round on her little feet, and to say short words.
 
But no one ever taught her to say papa or mamma, those lovely first words of childhood. What had nobody's child to do with such names?
 
It might have seemed strange to most people that Julia Grant did not love this little thing, so thrown upon her mercy in its tender babyhood.[Pg 165] But, despite theories, all women are not fond of children. Every woman is, perhaps, fond, in a blind, instinctive way, of her own; but the more heavenly love which takes all children in its arms and blesses them is not by any means universal.
 
The most powerful trait in Mrs. Grant's character was a silent, unobtrusive selfishness. The whole world revolved, to her thought, about her. Rains fell, dews dropped earthward, winds blew and suns shone for Julia Grant. She had consented with secret reluctance to keep the child, and from that moment a root of bitterness and jealousy had sprung up in her heart. If her husband had thought much of her comfort, she used to say to herself, he would not have wanted to put all this care upon her.
 
She was quite ready, therefore, to be jealous, and to feel as if something was taken from her every time he tossed the little one in his arms, or called it a pet name; and after a while—not at once, for he was naturally the most unsuspicious of men—some instinct revealed this to[Pg 166] him, and made him, lover of peace as he was, very chary of manifesting in his wife's presence any especial tenderness for the little stranger within his gates.
 
But summer and winter came and went, and with their sun and shade nobody's child grew on toward girlhood. She had a great deal of beauty, of a shadowy, delicate kind. She was seldom ill, but she was a very frail-looking child. The quick, changeful color in her cheeks, the depth of feeling in her dark eyes, the tremulous curves about her mouth, all indicated an organization of extreme sensitiveness; a nature to which love would be as the very breath of life, but which was too shrinking and timid ever to put forth any claims for it, or make any advances.
 
For ten years she was the only little one in the Grant household. Their affairs prospered, they grew richer every yea............