They went to the landing on the south of the rock, climbed the steps and entered the great room, now warm and streaming with sunlight, where Barney's mother was waiting,—a strange, physically weakened cousin Agnes but whose touch seemed more vital than ever before as her lips kissed Ethel; whose hands, though thin, clasped with a confident pressure; whose eyes looked at Ethel steadily as ever, with some new sadness in them but with new joy, too, and with that haunting shadow quite gone.
She told to Ethel, for herself, everything which Bennet already had repeated and then related the events following Barney's birth here on Resurrection Rock.
She had stayed here with her baby during the summer, for she had regained strength slowly. In September she realized that she was in desperate need of surgical care. It had been fair and warm in that Moon of the Gathering of Wild Rice. Her baby was well; Noah Jo's wife, Woman of the Valley, had proved very careful and had been doing for the baby just as Agnes asked. Every evening Noah Jo brought fresh milk from the shore. Agnes had become so ill that she scarcely was able to travel, much less trust herself with the care of her child on the journey.
Later, it was easy to see that she should have taken the baby to some dependable white people or arranged for his care at some institution. But an institution was what Agnes most dreaded; and she feared to let any white people know that she had a baby; for was she not without a husband and obviously an unfit person to rear a child? So she had left her baby with Woman of the Valley and journeyed alone to Sault Sainte Marie where they had kept her in bed, not a few days but weeks. She tried to escape the well-
