Mrs. Josselin. When my first was born, Michael— that's my husband-stayed home from sea o' purpose to take it. My first was a girl. No, not Ruth; Ruth was born after my man died, and I had her christened Ruth because some one told me it stood for "sorrow." I had three before Ruth—a girl an' two boys, an' buried them all.

Miss Quiney (listening). Hush!

Mrs. Josselin (not hearing, immersed in her own reflections). If you call a child by a sorrowful name it's apt to ward off the ill-luck. Look at Ruth nowchristened in sorrow an' married, after all, to the richest in the land!

Miss Quiney (in desperation). Oh, hush! hush!

A low moan comes from the next room. The women sit silent, their faces white in the dawn that now comes stealing in at the window, conquering the candle-light by little and little.

Mrs. Strongtharm. I thought I heard a child's cry. They cry at once.

Miss Quiney. Ah? I fancied it, too-a feeble

one.

Mrs. Strongtharm (rising after a long pause). Something is wrong..

As she goes to listen at the door, it opens, and the manmidwife enters. His face is grave.

Mrs. Strongtharm and Miss Quiney ask him together, under their breath-Well ?

He answers: It is well. We have saved her life, I trust.

-And the child?

-A boy. It lived less than a minute. . . . Yet a shapely child....

Miss Quiney clasps her hands. Shall she, within her breast, thank God? She cannot. She hears the voice saying,

A very shapely child. . . . But the labour was difficult. There was some pressure on the brain, some lesion.

They would have denied Ruth sight of the poor little body, but she stretched out her arms for it and insisted. Then as she held it, flesh of her flesh, to her breast and felt it cold, she-she, whose courage had bred wonder in them, even awe-she who had smiled between her pangs, murmuring pretty thanks-wailed low, and, burying her face, lay still.

CHAPTER VI

CHILDLESS MOTHER

In the sad and cheated days that followed, she, with the milk of motherhood wasting in her, saw with new eyes-saw many things heretofore hidden from her.

She did not believe in any scriptural God. But she believed-she could not help believing-in an awful Justice overarching all human life with its law, as it overarched the very stars in heaven. And this law she believed to rest in goodness, accessible to the pure conscience, but stern against the transgressor.

Because she believed this, she had felt that the marriage rite, with such an one as Mr. Silk as intercessor between her vows and a clean Heaven, could be but a sullying of marriage. Yes, and she felt it still; of this, at any rate, she was sure.

But in her pride-as truly she saw it, in her pride of chastity-she had left the child out of account. He had inherited the world to face, not armed with her weapon of scorn. He had not won freedom through a scourge. He had grown to his fate in her womb, and in the womb she had betrayed him.

She had been blind, blind! She had lived for her lover and herself. To him and to her (it had seemed) this warm, transitory life belonged; a fleeting space of

time, a lodge leased to bliss. . . . Now she fronted the truth, that between the selfish rapture of lovers Heaven slips a child, smiling at the rapture, provident for the race. Now she read the secret of woman's nesting instinct; the underlying wisdom stirring the root of it, awaking passion not to satisfy passion, but that the world may go on and on to its unguessed ends. Now she could read ironically the courtship of man and maid, dallying by river-paths, beside running water overarched by boughs that had protected a thousand such courtships. Each pair in turn-poor fools!-had imagined the world theirs, compressed into their grasp; whereas the wise world was merely flattering, coaxing them, preparing for the child.

She should have been preparing, too. For what are women made but for motherhood? She? She had had but a hand to turn, a word to utter, and this childhealthily begotten, if ever child was, and to claim, if ever child could, the best-has broken triumphing through the gate of her travail. But she had betrayed him. The new-born spirit had arrived expectant, had cast one look across the threshold, and with one wail had fled. Through and beyond her answering wail, as she laid her head on the pillow, she heard the lost feet, the small betrayed feet, pattering away into darkness.

When she grew stronger, it consoled her a little to talk with Mrs. Strongtharm; not confiding her regrets

and self-reproaches, but speculating much on this great book of Maternity into which she had been given a glimpse. The metaphor was Mrs. Strongtharm's.

"Ay," said that understanding female, "a book you may call it, and a wonderful one; written by all the women, white an' black, copper-skin an' red-skin, that ever groped their way in it with pangs an' joys; for every one writes in it as well as reads. What's more, 'tis all in one language, though they come, as my man would say, from all the airts o' Babel.”

"I wonder," mused Ruth, "if somewhere in it there's a chapter would tell me why, when I lie awake and think of my lost one, 'tis his footsteps I listen forfeet that never walked!"

"Hush ye, now. . . . Isn't it always their feet, the darlings! Don't the sound of it, more'n their voices, call me to door a dozen times a day? . . . I never bore child; but I made garments in hope o' one. Tell me, when you knitted his little boots, wasn't it different from all the rest?"

"Ah, put them away!"

"To be sure, dearie, to be sure-all ready for the next." "I shall never have another child."

Mrs. Strongtharm smiled tolerantly.

"Never," Ruth repeated; "never; I know it."

With the same assurance of prophecy she answered her lover on his return, a bare two months later.