gnorant mulatto girl, whom she had always regarded as of different
clay from herself. With that miraculous power of grief to level all
things, she felt that the barriers of knowledge, of race, of all the
pitiful superiorities with which human beings have obscured and
decorated the underlying spirit of life, had melted back into the
nothingness from which they had emerged in the beginning. This feeling
of oneness, which would have surprised and startled her yesterday,
appeared so natural to her now, that, after the first instant of
recognition, she hardly thought of it again.

"Thank you, Marthy," she answered gently, and closing the door, went
back to her chair under the raised corner of the sheet. When the doctor
came at nine o'clock she was sitting there, in the same position, so
still and tense that she seemed hardly to be breathing, so ashen grey
that the sheet hanging above her head showed deadly white by contrast
with her face. In those three hours she knew that the clinging tendrils
of personal desire had relaxed their hold forever on life and youth.

"If he doesn't get worse, we'll pull through," said the doctor, turning
from his examination of Harry to lay his hand, which felt as heavy as
lead, on her shoulder. "We've an even chance--if his heart doesn't go
back on us." And he added, "Most mothers are good nurses, Jinny, but I
never saw a better one than you are--unless it was your own mother. You
get it from her, I reckon. I remember when you went through diphtheria
how she sent your father to stay with one of the neighbours, and shut
herself up with old Ailsey to nurse you. I don't believe she undressed
or closed her eyes for a week."

Her own mother! So she was not the only one who had suffered this
anguish--other women, many women, had been through it before she was
born. It was a part of that immemorial pang of motherhood of which the
old doctor had spoken. "But, was I ever in danger? Was I as ill as
Harry?" she asked.

"For twenty-four hours we thought you'd slip through our fingers every
minute. 'Twas only your mother's nursing that kept you alive--I've told
her that twenty times. She never spared herself an instant, and, it may
have been my imagination, but she never seemed to me to be the same
woman afterwards. Something had gone out of her."

Now she understood, now she knew, something had gone out of her, also,
and this something was youth. No woman who had fought with death for a
child could ev