Nanny,' and wagged his head at every word." I had laid my hand on them at last. I wished, in the strangest way, that I had not. Yet of course it had to be. "That's just what he did do," I said. As she felt the fine kid-skin of the clockwork dog, her face began to twitch. "I thought perhaps my baby had left me because I had so little to give him. But if a baby could leave all this!" She cried flatly, as though constant repetition in the night had made it as instinctive a reaction to suffering as a moan, "I want a child! I want a child!" Her arms invoked the wasted life that had been squandered in this room. "It's all gone so wrong," she fretted, and her voice dropped to a solemn whisper. "They each had only half a life." I had to steady her. She could not go to Chris and shock him not only by her news, but also by her agony. I rose and took her the things I had found in the ottoman and the toy cupboard. "I think these are the best things to take. This is one of the blue jerseys he used to wear. This is the red ball he and his father used to play with on the lawn." Her hard hunger for the child that was not melted into a tenderness for the child that had been. She looked broodingly at what I carried, then laid a kind hand on my arm. "You've chosen the very things he will remember. Oh, you poor girl!" I found that from her I could accept even pity. She nursed the jersey and the ball, changed them from arm to arm, and held them to her face. "I think I know the kind of boy he was—a man from the first." She kissed them, folded up the jersey, and neatly set the ball upon it on the ottoman, and regarded them with tears. "There, put them back. That's all I wanted them for. All I came up here for." I stared. "To get Chris's boy," she moaned. "You thought I meant to take them out to Chris?" She wrung her hands; her weak voice quavered at the sternness of her resolution. "How can I?" I grasped her hands. "Why should you bring him back?" I said. I might have known there was deliverance in her yet.
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