hing, gurgling,
weeping, and intermittently crying in a shrill voice: "Oh! Lord have
mercy; Lord ha' mercy!"

"Now, see you 'ere, my dear," said Mrs. Reade, when nurse had been
recovered to a red-eyed sanity, "it's time she was told. I've never 'eld
with keepin' it from 'er, myself, and I've 'ad more experience than
many...." Mrs. Reade argued with abundant recourse to parenthesis.

"Is she strog edough?" asked the nurse, still with tears in her voice;
"cad she bear the sight of hib?" She blew her nose vigorously, and then
continued with greater clearness: "I'm afraid it may turn her head."

Out of her deep store of wisdom, Mrs. Reade produced a fact which she
elaborated and confirmed by apt illustration, adducing more particularly
the instance of Mrs. Harrison's third. "She's 'is mother," was the
essence of her argument, a fact of deep and strange significance.

The nurse yielded, and so the circumstance of Stott's household was
changed, and Stott himself was once more able to come home to meals.

The nurse, wisely, left all diplomacy to the capable Mrs. Reade, a woman
specially fitted by nature for the breaking of news. She delivered a
long, a record-breaking circumlocution, and it seemed that Ellen Mary,
who lay with closed eyes, gathered no hint of its import. But when the
impressive harangue was slowly rustling to collapse like an exhausted
balloon, she opened her eyes and said quite clearly,

"What's wrong with 'im, then?"

The question had the effect of reinflation, but at last the child itself
was brought, and it was open-eyed.

The supreme ambition of all great women--and have not all women the
potentialities of greatness?--is to give birth to a god. That ambition
it is which is marred by the disappointing birth of a female child--when
the man-child is born, there is always hope, and slow is the realisation
of failure. That realisation never came to Ellen Mary. She accepted her
child with the fear that is adoration. When she dropped her eyes before
her god's searching glance, she did it in reverence. She hid her faith
from the world, but in her heart she believed that she was blessed above
all women. In secret, she worshipped the inscrutable wonder that had
used her as the instrument of his incarnation. Perhaps she was
right....

FOOTNOTES:

[3] A study of genius shows that in a percentage of cases so large as to
exclude the possibility of coincidence, the exceptional man, whether in
the world of