rs, had begun to grow fainter on the
windowsill.

"He is better, doctor, isn't he? Don't you notice that he struggles less
when he breathes?"

He looked at her with an expression of contemplative pity in his old
watery eyes, and she gave a little cry and stretched out her hands,
blindly groping.

"Doctor, I'll do anything--anything, if you'll only save him." An
impulse to reach beyond him to some impersonal, cosmic Power greater
than he was, made her add desperately: "I'll never ask for anything else
in my life. I'll give up everything, if you'll only promise me that you
will save him."

She stood up, drawing her thin figure, as tense as a cord, to its full
height, and beneath the flowered blue dressing-gown her shoulder blades
showed sharply under their fragile covering of flesh. Her hair, which
she had not undone since the first shock of Harry's illness, hung in
straight folds on either side of her pallid and haggard face. Even the
colour of her eyes seemed to have changed, for their flower-like blue
had faded to a dull grey.

"If we can pull through the night, Jinny," he said huskily, and added
almost sternly, "you must bear up, so much depends on you. Remember, it
is your first serious illness, but it may not be your last. You've got
to take the pang of motherhood along with the pleasure, my dear----"

The pang of motherhood! Long after he had left her, and she had heard
the street gate click behind him, she sat motionless, repeating the
words, by Harry's little bed. The pang of motherhood--this was what she
was suffering--the poignant suspense, the quivering waiting, the abject
terror of loss, the unutterable anguish of the nerves, as if one's heart
were being slowly torn out of one's body. She had had the joy, and now
she was enduring the inevitable pang which is bound up, like a hidden
pulse, in every mortal delight. Never pleasure without pain, never
growth without decay, never life without death. The Law ruled even in
love, and all the pitiful little sacrifices which one offered to
Omnipotence, which one offered blindly to the Power that might separate,
with a flaming sword, the cause from the effect, the substance from the
shadow--what of them? While Harry lay there, wrapped in that burning
stupor, she prayed, not as she had been taught to pray in her childhood,
not with the humble and resigned worship of civilization, but in the
wild and threatening lament of a savage who seeks to reach the ears of
an