Song of the Lark | Page 6

He could do better by the child if he had her to himself.
He had no children of his own. His marriage was a very unhappy one.
As he lifted and undressed Thea, he thought to himself what a beauti-

ful thing a little girl's body was,--like a flower. It was so neatly and
delicately fashioned, so soft, and so milky white. Thea must have got
her hair and her silky skin from her mother. She was a little Swede,
through and through. Dr. Archie could not help thinking how he would
cherish a little creature like this if she were his. Her hands, so lit- tle
and hot, so clever, too,--he glanced at the open exer- cise book on the
piano. When he had stitched up the flax- seed jacket, he wiped it neatly
about the edges, where the paste had worked out on the skin. He put on
her the clean nightgown he had warmed before the fire, and tucked the
blankets about her. As he pushed back the hair that had fuzzed down
over her eyebrows, he felt her head thought- fully with the tips of his
fingers. No, he couldn't say that it was different from any other child's
head, though he believed that there was something very different about
her. He looked intently at her wide, flushed face, freckled nose, fierce
little mouth, and her delicate, tender chin--the one soft touch in her
hard little Scandinavian face, as if some fairy godmother had caressed
her there and left a cryptic promise. Her brows were usually drawn

together defiantly, but never when she was with Dr. Archie. Her
affection for him was prettier than most of the things that went to make
up the doctor's life in Moonstone.
The windows grew gray. He heard a tramping on the attic floor, on the
back stairs, then cries: "Give me my shirt!" "Where's my other
stocking?"
"I'll have to stay till they get off to school," he reflected, "or they'll be
in here tormenting her, the whole lot of them."

II
For the next four days it seemed to Dr. Archie that his patient might
slip through his hands, do what he might. But she did not. On the
contrary, after that she recovered very rapidly. As her father remarked,
she must have inherited the "constitution" which he was never tired of
admiring in her mother.
One afternoon, when her new brother was a week old, the doctor found
Thea very comfortable and happy in her bed in the parlor. The sunlight
was pouring in over her shoulders, the baby was asleep on a pillow in a
big rocking-chair beside her. Whenever he stirred, she put out her hand
and rocked him. Nothing of him was visible but a flushed, puffy fore-
head and an uncompromisingly big, bald cranium. The door into her
mother's room stood open, and Mrs. Kronborg was sitting up in bed
darning stockings. She was a short, stalwart woman, with a short neck
and a determined-looking head. Her skin was very fair, her face calm
and unwrinkled, and her yellow hair, braided down her back as she lay
in bed, still looked like a girl's. She was a woman whom Dr. Archie
respected; active, practical, unruffled; good- humored, but determined.
Exactly the sort of woman to take care of a flighty preacher. She had
brought her hus- band some property, too,--one fourth of her father's
broad acres in Nebraska,--but this she kept in her own name. She had

profound respect for her husband's erudition and eloquence. She sat
under his preaching with deep humility, and was as much taken in by
his stiff shirt and white neck- ties as if she had not ironed them herself
by lamplight the night before they appeared correct and spotless in the
pul- pit. But for all this, she had no confidence in his adminis- tration of
worldly affairs. She looked to him for morning

prayers and grace at table; she expected him to name the babies and to
supply whatever parental sentiment there was in the house, to
remember birthdays and anniver- saries, to point the children to moral
and patriotic ideals. It was her work to keep their bodies, their clothes,
and their conduct in some sort of order, and this she accom- plished
with a success that was a source of wonder to her neighbors. As she
used to remark, and her husband ad- miringly to echo, she "had never
lost one." With all his flightiness, Peter Kronborg appreciated the
matter-of-fact, punctual way in which his wife got her children into the
world and along in it. He believed, and he was right in believing, that
the sovereign State of Colorado was much indebted to Mrs. Kronborg
and women like