e ran, and
flung himself against his legs, with the sure confidence of babyhood in
all the new, strange world, and clamored to be taken home.

Nicanor stooped to him with a laugh, recognizing him as the son of one
Julius the Tungrian, a field-hand belonging to the farmer Medor, whose
estate lay between the hills a half-mile from Thorney.

"How now, manling? Why these tears at thy first venture into the world?
How didst stray so far from mother's skirts? Dost wish to go home?"

"Ay, home!" wept young Julius. "Thou wilt take me home!"

"Come, then," said Nicanor, and swung him to his shoulder, and turned
back from the ford to the road again.

It came upon him then that this was the first time that ever he had held
a child in his arms. Always before had children run from him, learning,
like their elders, to shun him: now he knew why. The softness of the
round little body thrilled him oddly; the touch of the clinging hands,
the baby weight upon his shoulder, called into life emotions such as he
had never thought to know. A child, a little living child, her child and
his.... The thought stirred him suddenly to his soul; and with the
thought a fresh bit of the Scroll of Life unrolled before his
eyes,--that Scroll which slowly he was learning how to read. His heart
caught another phase of the old experience of the world, the high pride
and joy of fatherhood. Again, as once before, he got a flash of new,
strange light into the hearts and minds of all the world of men, as with
the parting of a veil; found a new chord under his hand to be struck
into pulsing life. All unaware that on a day his lady had said, "His son
could I love, and be proud that he was mine," he marvelled at himself
and at his feeling, and still more at the little one that had such power
to wake it.

He reached the farm of Medor, and stopped at the cabin of Julius, whom
he knew, which stood at the edge of the estate. Through the open doorway
he could see, in the obscurity of the one poor room within, a woman's
figure, bending to rub her man's back, bruised and raw from the harness
of the plough, with ointment of herbs--a nightly proceeding regular as
the evening meal. When she had done, he would take his turn in rubbing
her; since it was not enough for women to be the bearers of children,
but also they must be hewers of wood and drawers of water as well. She
rose to straighten herself from her task, and saw the tall figure coming
doorward, with the littl