Page:The leopard's spots - a romance of the white man's burden-1865-1900 (IA leopardsspotsrom00dixo).pdf/399

 life. She believed with a child's simple faith that all nature was as innocent as her own heart.

Tom smoothed her curls and kissed her at last, and she slipped her arm around his neck and squeezed it tight.

"Ain't she purty and sweet now?" he exclaimed.

"Tom, you'll spoil her yet," warned Gaston as he smiled and took his leave, throwing a kiss to Flora as he passed through the little yard gate. Tom had built a fence close around his house when Flora was a baby to shut her in while he was at work.

Two days later about five o'clock in the afternoon as Gaston sat in his office writing a letter, to his sweetheart, his face aglow with love and the certainty that she was his, as he read and re-read her last glowing words he was startled by the sudden clang of the court house bell. At first he did not move, only looking up from his paper. Sometimes mischievous boys rang the bell and ran down the steps before any one could catch them. But the bell continued its swift stroke seeming to grow louder and wilder every moment. He saw a man rush across the square, and then the bell of the Methodist, and then of the Baptist churches joined their clamour to the alarm.

He snapped the lid of his desk, snatched his hat and ran down the steps.

As he reached the street, he heard the long piercing cry of a woman's voice, high, strenuous, quivering!

"A lost child! A lost child!"

What a cry! He was never so thrilled and awed by a human voice. In it was trembling all the anguish of every mother's broken heart transmitted through the centuries!

At the court house door an excited group had gathered. A man was standing on the steps gesticulating wildly and telling the crowd all he knew about it. Over the din he caught the name,