Little Louis

For many days did Mrs. Kennedy hover between life and death, never
asking for her baby, and seldom noticing her husband, who, while
declaring there was no danger, still deemed it necessary, in case
anything should happen, to send for his sister, Mrs. Kelsey, who had
not visited him since his last marriage. She was a proud,
fashionable woman, who saw nothing attractive in the desolate old
house, and who had conceived an idea that her brother's second wife
was a sort of nobody whom he had picked up among the New England
hills. But the news of her illness softened her feelings in a
measure, and she started for Laurel Hill, thinking that if Matty
died she hoped a certain dashing, brilliant woman, called Maude
Glendower, might go there, and govern the tyrannical doctor, even as
he had governed others.

It was late in the afternoon when she reached her brother's house,
from which Nellie came running out to meet her, accompanied by
Maude. From the latter the lady at first turned disdainfully away,
but ere long stole another look at the brown-faced girl, about whom
there was something very attractive.

"Curtains, as I live!" she exclaimed, as she entered the parlor. "A
piano, and marble table, too. Where did these come from?"

"They are ma's, and she's got a baby upstairs," answered Maude, and
the lady's hand rested for an instant on the little curly head, for
strange as it may seem, she esteemed more highly a woman who owned a
piano and handsome table than she did one whose worldly possessions
were more limited.