tself so seriously, may it be after all only a
superior sort of spider-egg, hatching out in due season, spinning busy
webs for the world to brush away, laying other eggs, and so on, _ad
infinitum_? Perhaps the God of simple people, such as her mother and
Philip Benoix and Brother Bates, the God upon whom she herself called at
times because of the force of early habit--perhaps He was only
life-principle--the warmth of the sun, for instance--an impersonal,
intangible something which started the universe as one winds a clock,
and left it to go on ticking till the mechanism runs down.... Good or
bad, wise or foolish--what difference? Spin our webs no matter how
carefully, they are only gossamer, visible for a moment with the dew or
the frost upon them and then--vanished. Human and spider alike, unnoted,
innumerable, self-perpetuating....

Poor Kate Kildare! When natures such as hers lose their self-reliance,
life becomes as unsubstantial as an opium dream. If they cannot count
upon themselves, what then may they count upon?

She jumped out of bed, and went to the window, where she stood for a
while in the cold starlight, letting the wind blow in across her
feverish face. She wrapped blankets around her, and sat listening to the
sounds of the sleeping country; an owl mournfully hooting, a premature
cock crowing lustily, the drowsy whickering of horses stirring in their
stalls; for it was two o'clock, and the countryside was beginning to
dream of day. She stayed for a long while brooding over the land she
loved, as over a sleeping child. Always the great out-of-doors had its
balm for her....

Suddenly she sat erect. In the shadows back of the stables something had
moved. One of the dogs, perhaps? Then out into the starlight, crossing
rapidly toward the house, flitted the slight figure of a girl, with
several of the dogs leaping and gamboling about her in a silence that
showed her to be no stranger. She was shrouded in a long hooded cape,
and passed out of Kate's range too quickly lo be recognizable.

"Now which of the wenches was that?" thought Kate, frowning. The amorous
adventures of their black servants have come to be accepted by Southern
housekeepers with unenquiring philosophy. "But why was she coming to the
house at this hour?" she wondered further.

The negroes had their quarters well at the back, and no one slept in the
"great house" with Kate and her daughters, except the housewoman, Ella,
too elderly for midni