ting much on this great book of Maternity into which she had
been given a glimpse. The metaphor was Mrs. Strongtharm's.

"Ay," said that understanding female, "a book you may call it, and a
wonderful one; written by all the women, white an' black, copper-skin
an' red-skin, that ever groped their way in it with pangs an' joys;
for every one writes in it as well as reads. What's more, 'tis all
in one language, though they come, as my man would say, from all the
airts o' Babel."

"I wonder," mused Ruth, "if somewhere in it there's a chapter would
tell me why, when I lie awake and think of my lost one, 'tis his
footsteps I listen for--feet that never walked!"

"Hush ye, now. . . . Isn't it always their feet, the darlings!
Don't the sound of it, more'n their voices, call me to door a dozen
times a day? . . . I never bore child; but I made garments in hope
o' one. Tell me, when you knitted his little boots, wasn't it
different from all the rest?"

"Ah, put them away!"

"To be sure, dearie, to be sure--all ready for the next."

"I shall never have another child."

Mrs. Strongtharm smiled tolerantly.

"Never," Ruth repeated; "never; I know it."

With the same assurance of prophesy she answered her lover on his
return, a bare two months later.

"But you must have known. . . . Even your letters kept it secret.
Yet, had you written, the next ship would have brought me. Surely
you did not doubt _that?_"

"No."

"Then why did you not tell me?"

It was the inevitable question. She had forestalled it so often in
her thoughts that, when uttered at last, it gave her a curious
sensation of re-enacting some long-past scene.

"I thought you did not care for children."

He was pacing the room. He halted, and stared at her in sheer
astonishment. Many a beautiful woman touches the height of her
beauty after the birth of her first child; and this woman had never
stood before him in loveliness that, passing comprehension, so nearly
touched the divine. But her perversity passed comprehension yet
farther.

"Do you call that an answer?" he demanded.

"No. . . . You asked, and I had to say something; but it is no
answer. Forgive me. It was the best I could find."

He still eyed her, between wrath and admiration.

"I think," she said, after a pause, "the true answer is just that I
did wrongly--wrongly for the child's sake."

"That's certain. And your own?"

"My own? That does not seem to me to count so muc