The lover in him sent him swiftly to her side, and as he drew her
into his arms she let her head fall back against his shoulder with a
tremulous sigh of infinite content.

And then, from the firelit corner of the room, came the sound of a
feeble wailing. Hugh started as though stung, and his eyes left his
wife's face and riveted themselves upon the figure in the low chair by
the hearth--Virginie, rocking a little as she sat, and crooning a Breton
lullaby to the baby in her arms.

In a moment remembrance rushed upon him, cutting in twain as though
with a dividing sword this exquisite moment of reunion with his wife.
Insensibly his arms relaxed their clasp of the frail body they held, and
Diane, sensing their slackening, looked up startled and disconcerted.

Her eyes followed the direction of his glance, then, coming back to
his face, searched it wildly. Instantly she knew the meaning of that
suddenly limp clasp and all that it implied.

"Hugh!" The throbbing tenderness had gone out of her voice, leaving it
dry and toneless. "Hugh! You don't mean . . . you're _angry_ that it's a
girl?"

He looked down at her--at the frightened eyes, the lovely face fined by
recent pain, and all his instinct was to reassure and comfort her. But
something held him back. The old, narrow creed in which he had been
reared, whose shackles he had broken through when he had recklessly
followed the bidding of his heart and married Diane, was once more
mastering him--bidding him resist the natural human impulses of love and
kindliness evoked by his wife's appeal.

_"God Himself has taken your punishment into His own Hands."_

Again he seemed to hear Catherine's accusing tones, and the fanatical
strain inbred in him answered like a boat to its helm. There must be no
more compromise, no longer any evasion of the issues of right and wrong.
He had sinned, and both he and the woman for whose sake he had defied
his own creed, and that of his fathers before him, must make atonement.
He drew himself up, and stood stiff and unbending beside the bed. In his
light-grey eyes there shone that same indomitable ardour of the zealot
which had shone in Catherine's.

"No," he said. "I am not angry that the child is a girl. I accept it as
a just retribution."

No man possessed of the ordinary instincts of common humanity would have
so greeted his wife just when she had emerged, spent and exhausted,
from woman's supreme conflict with death. But the fanat