ased to go to church: she put
the strange book out of the way when he was expected on a
Sunday-afternoon; but she studied it without concealment from her old
husband and yet in silence, as though guilty of a secret heresy. He had
asked her once:

"What are you reading there?"

And she told him the strange title and said that she wanted to enquire
into things, but nothing further had been uttered between the two old
people, though she heard him silently express his disapproval. But,
since the day when, years ago, she had yielded to her husband and
consented to the superhuman sacrifice of surrendering her son to the
woman whom that son had plunged into unhappiness--because this sacrifice
was the duty which was required of her by divine and human equity--since
that time she had had no peace, read as she might in her Bible, talk as
she would with the minister, pray as she did for hours on end. She had
had no peace: deep down in herself she had always borne a grudge because
Heaven had laid so heavy a sacrifice upon her, the mother. Her husband
had had the strength of a man who pursues the straight path, the path of
duty, and he had surrendered his son and lost him without a superfluous
word. But she, though she also spoke no word, had not resigned herself;
and her soul had rebelled; and she had thought that she was lost for all
eternity ... until a gentle ray had come, by accident, to comfort her
out of the strange book which, by accident, she had taken up and opened.
And, still a believer, though she no longer went to church and though,
in her heart, she did not agree with the minister, did not agree with
her old husband, she nevertheless endeavoured to unite, to reconcile, to
blend what remained of the old faith, which had once stood firm as a
rock, with the new faith; and, when she prayed, she prayed indeed to the
same God of her old, former faith, but she listened also to the voices,
to that part of the invisible world which hovers around us and saves us
and guides us and warns and protects us and sets its soft-smiling
compassion between us and the rigid immutability of the divine grace or
displeasure, tempering the divine brow into a softer glance. That was
her secret; and what she silently told her husband of the new faith
still remained an unpenetrated secret to him in the dumb evenings when
they sat together and read and he heard her, in silence, say that she
believed differently from what she once did because she h