o the
child's foot--"was for me the sign of Prospero."

Ashe looked at her with anxiety, finding it indeed impossible to laugh
at her.

She was very pale, her breath came with difficulty, and she trembled
from head to foot. He tried to draw her into his arms, but she held him
away.

"That first year I had been so happy," she continued, in the same voice.
"Everything was so perfect, so glorious. Life was like a great pageant,
in a palace. All the old terrors went. I often had fears as a
child--fears I couldn't put into words, but that overshadowed me. Then
when I saw Alice--the shadow came nearer. But that was all gone. I
thought God was reconciled to me, and would always be kind to me now.
And then I saw that foot, and I knew that He hated me still. He had
burned His mark into my baby's flesh. And I was never to be quite happy
again, but always in fear, fear of pain--and death--and grief--"

She paused. Her large eyes gazed into vacancy, and her whole slight
frame showed the working of some mysterious and pitiful distress.

A wave of poignant alarm swept through Ashe's mind, coupled also with a
curious sense of something foreseen. He had never witnessed precisely
this mood in her before; but now that it was thus revealed, he was
suddenly aware "that something like it had been for long moving
obscurely below the surface of her life. He took the child and laid him
on the floor, where he rolled at ease, cooing to himself. Then he came
back to Kitty, and soothed her with extraordinary tenderness and skill.
Presently she looked at him, as though some obscure trouble of which she
had been the victim had released her, and she were herself again.

"Don't go away just yet," she said, in a voice which was still low and
shaken. He came close to her, again put his arms round her, and held her
on his breast in silence.

"That is heavenly!" he heard her say to herself after a while, in a
whisper.

"Kitty!" His eyes grew dim and he stooped to kiss her.

"Heavenly--" she went on, still as though following out her own thought
rather than speaking to him, "because one <i>yields</i>--<i>yields</i>! Life is
such tension--always."

She closed her eyes quickly, and he watched the beautiful lashes lying
still upon her cheek. With an emotion he could not explain--for it was
not an emotion of the senses, just as her yielding had not been a
yielding of the senses but a yielding of the soul--he continued to hold
her in his arms, her