, the weight of the stone grew heavier
and heavier while the hunger for bread grew daily more acute. Not even
the departure of interfering relatives could bring freedom, for the
baby's stumpy arms bound Mary to the house as inexorably as bolts and
bars could have done. She passed weary hours in a hushed room watching
the baby, when outside the sun was shining, the birds calling, the
apples waxing greener and larger, and the shining knights and ladies
winding down to Camelot. She sat upon the porch, still beside the baby,
while the river rippled, the wheatfields wimpled, and the cows came
trailing down from the pasture, down from the upland pasture where the
sentinel hickory stood and watched until the sun went down, and, one by
one, the lights came out in distant Camelot. She listened for the light
laughter of the ladies, the jingling of the golden armor, the swishing
of the branches and of the waves. Listened all in vain, for Theodora,
that gift of God, had powerful lungs and a passion for exercising them
so that minor sounds were overwhelmed and only yells remained.

But the deprivation against which she most passionately rebelled was
that of her father's society. Before the advent of Theodora she had been
his constant companion. They were perfectly happy together, for the poet
who at nineteen had burned to challenge the princes of the past and to
mold the destinies of the future was, at twenty-nine, very nearly
content to busy himself about the occurrences of the present and to edit
a weekly paper in the town which had known and honored his father, and
was proud of, if puzzled by, their well-informed debonair son. Even
himself he sometimes puzzled. He knew that this was not to be his life's
work, this chronicling of the very smallest beer, this gossip and
friendliness and good cheer. But it served to fill his leisure and his
modest exchequer until such time as he could finish his great tragedy
and take his destined place among the writers of his time. Meanwhile, he
told himself, with somewhat rueful humor, there was always an editor
ready to think well of his minor poems and an audience ready to marvel
at them, "which is more, my dear," he pointed out to his admiring wife,
"than Burns could have said for himself--or Coleridge."

And when his confidence and his hopes flickered, as the strongest of
hopes and confidence sometimes will, when his tragedy seemed far from
completion, his paper paltry, and his life narrow, h