The Blind Bond

The baby was born in the net-shed, because there was nowhere else on the quay with a stove that drew properly and a door that shut. Juno Ellery had been told by every woman on the rope walk that a first child took a day and a night at the least; but she had gone down to the harbor at noon with her husband's dinner in a cloth and decided, halfway along the quay, that the women of the rope walk did not know what they were talking about.

Senna was in the net-shed already, which was the only reason she was any use at all. She had come down from the cliff that morning to look at a pilot's coat for her mother, who would not come down the stair for a coat any more, or for anything less than a wreck or a wedding. She had been sitting on an upturned crate by the stove with the coat across her knees and her own book open on top of it when the door banged back. It was Juno Ellery, holding on to the frame with both hands; and she said, in a perfectly reasonable voice, that she thought somebody had better fetch the midwife, and that she thought they had better be quick.