Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/113

 side her boy. All night she listened to his easy, regular breathing, and all night long there was such a thanksgiving in her heart that she could not sleep.

The next day the child was quite himself again, trotting about the house, as active and as naughty as he had ever been in his life. Hetold his sisters he had had a "bad dream." It had, indeed, been a bad dream, a nightmare, which in his mother's eyes threw its ominous shadow upon all that had preceded and all that was to have followed it. No amount of reasoning could induce her to go to the ball, nor could she bring herself to look upon that terrible midnight hour as anything but a punishment and a warning.

"I can't help what you say, Ben," she protested with a fervor which he only half understood. "I've been a wicked, thoughtless woman. If I hadn't had my heart 'fixed upon the things of this world,' I shouldn't have been parading about in that moiré antique dress, talking so fast that I couldn't hear that precious child gasping for the breath of life. Think of it! only think of it! A little helpless child lying at death's door, while his mother's head was so full of princes and balls that she had forgotten she had a child to her name! No, Ben, I wouldn't goa single step. It would be tempting Providence. And besides," she added, giving what was, after all, the true reason, "I couldn't."

"And Edward?" urged Ben, whose argumen-