nding atmosphere was charged with
opalescent lights.

Her eyes rested upon it with a quick sense of its beauty; then the
sunset lost itself in the round of her thoughts. She had missed Dudley,
and she was glad that he was coming home to-night. For the first time
during the fifteen years of her marriage she experienced a vague
uneasiness at his absence. A year ago she had not known a tremor of
loneliness when he was away--but then the child was unborn. Now, in some
subtle way, the child's existence was bound and rebound in Dudley's. The
two stood together in her thoughts; she could not separate them--the
child was but a smaller, a closer, a dearer Dudley--a Dudley of her
dreams and visions, the ideal ending to life's realities.

As she sat beside the window, her eyes wandering from the sunset to the
baby asleep in Delphy's lap, she wondered that she had never before
suffered this incipient thrill of nervous fear. Was it that her
affection for her child had revivified all lesser emotions? Or was it
that with supreme love came the vague, invincible perception of supreme
loss? Did great happiness bear within itself the visible reflection of
great sorrow? Her life before this had been more peaceful--it had been
also less complete. With the coming of her heart's desire had awakened
her heart's inquietude--both had dawned after years of restless waiting
and uncertain wandering. It was borne in upon her, with something like a
pang, that the fulness of life had blossomed for her only when her first
youth was withered, when she had long since relinquished high
expectations or keen desire. She had set her young mind and her quick
passion on a far-away good, she had shed vain tears over the lack of it;
yet, in the end, she found compensation where she would least have
sought it--in the things which made up her destiny. She had learned the
wisdom of acceptance, and Fate had rewarded her, not by yielding to her
what she had called her heart's necessity, but by fitting her heart to
the necessity that was already hers. She had not known the fulfilment of
her young ideals, but she was content at last with an existence which
was a personal surrender to older realities. For herself she asked now
only busy days of domestic interests and the unbroken serenity of middle
age--but, despite herself, another life was before her, for she lived
again in her child.

The twilight fell. She put her work aside, and, coming to the hearth
rug, took t