he mother talking to him as he had never
heard the wife and woman talk. There was a passion, a mother love in
the hastily scrawled words that drove straight to the man's simple
heart. One little paragraph alone set his whole body quivering with
responsive emotion, and started the weak tears to his troubled eyes.

"Let me have her, Zip. Let me have her. Maybe I've lost my right,
but I'm her mother. I brought her into the world, Zip. And what
that means you can never understand. She's my flesh and blood.
She's part of me. I gave her the life she's got. I'm her mother,
Zip, and I'll go mad without her."

He read and re-read the letter. He would have read it a third time,
but the tears blinded his eyes and he crushed it into his pocket. His
heart yearned for her. It cried out to him in a great pity. It tore
him so that he was drawn to words spoken aloud to express his
feelings.

"Poor gal," he murmured. "Poor gal. Oh, my Jessie, what you done--what
you done?"

He dashed a hand across his eyes to wipe away the mist of tears that
obscured his vision and stood up. He was face to face with a situation
that might well have confounded him. But here, where only his heart
and not his head was appealed to, there was no confusion.

The woman had said he could not understand. She had referred to her
motherhood. But Scipio was a man who could understand just that. He
could understand with his heart, where his head might have failed him.
He read into the distracted woman's letter a meaning that perhaps no
other man could have read into it. He read a human soul's agony at the
severing of itself from all that belonged to its spiritual side. He
read more than the loss of the woman's offspring. He read the
despairing thought, perhaps unconscious, of a woman upon whom
repentance has begun its work. And his simple heart went out to her,
yearning, loving. He knew that her appeal was granted even before he
acknowledged it to himself.

And strangely enough the coming of that letter--he did not pause to
think how it had come--produced a miraculous change in him. His spirit
rose thrilling with hope, and filled with a courage which, but a few
moments before, seemed to have gone from him forever. He did not
understand, he did not pause to think. How could he? To him she was
still his Jessie, the love and hope of his life. It was her hand that
had penned that letter. It was her woman's heart appealing to his
mercy.

"God in heaven