ptural God. But she believed--she
could not help believing--in an awful Justice overarching all human
life with its law, as it overarched the very stars in heaven.
And this law she believed to rest in goodness, accessible to the pure
conscience, but stern against the transgressor.

Because she believed this, she had felt that the marriage rite, with
such an one as Mr. Silk for intercessor between her vows and a clean
Heaven, could be but a sullying of marriage. Yes, and she felt it
still; of this, at any rate, she was sure.

But in her pride--as truly she saw it, in her pride of chastity--she
had left the child out of account. _He_ had inherited the world to
face, not armed with her weapon of scorn. _He_ had not won freedom
through a scourge. He had grown to his fate in her womb, and in the
womb she had betrayed him.

She had been blind, blind! She had lived for her lover and herself.
To him and to her (it had seemed) this warm, transitory life
belonged; a fleeting space of time, a lodge leased to bliss. . . .
Now she fronted the truth, that between the selfish rapture of lovers
Heaven slips a child, smiling at the rapture, provident for the race.
Now she read the secret of woman's nesting instinct; the underlying
wisdom stirring the root of it, awaking passion not to satisfy
passion, but that the world may go on and on to its unguessed ends.
Now she could read ironically the courtship of man and maid, dallying
by river-paths, beside running water, overarched by boughs that had
protected a thousand such courtships. Each pair in turn--poor fools!
--had imagined the world theirs, compressed into their grasp; whereas
the wise world was merely flattering, coaxing them, preparing for the
child.

She should have been preparing, too. For what are women made but for
motherhood? She? She had had but a hand to turn, a word to utter,
and this child--healthily begotten, if ever child was, and to claim,
if ever child could, the best--has broken triumphing through the gate
of her travail. But she had betrayed him. The new-born spirit had
arrived expectant, had cast one look across the threshold, and with
one wail had fled. Through and beyond her answering wail, as she
laid her head on the pillow, she heard the lost feet, the small
betrayed feet, pattering away into darkness.

When she grew stronger, it consoled her a little to talk with Mrs.
Strongtharm; not confiding her regrets and self-reproaches, but
specula