rrow. But she
resolved that none should know before him, whose right it was to
first share the secret with herself; so she kept it, and pondered
over it in her heart.

And now Matt was on his homeward journey, and Miriam knew that
shortly they would be together in their cottage home. How should
she meet him, and greet him, and confess to him the joy that
overwhelmed her? What would he say? Would he love her more, or
would the advent of the little life divide the love hitherto her
undisputed own? Was the love of father towards mother a greater
and stronger and holier love than that of husband towards wife? or
did the birth of children draw off from each what was before a
mutual interchange? Thus she teased her throbbing brain, and vexed
her mind with questions she knew not how to solve. And yet her
woman's instincts told her that the new love would weld together
more closely the old, and that she and Matt would become one as
never before. And then a dim memory of a sentence in the old creed
came upon her--something about 'One in three and three in one,
undivided and eternal'--but she knew not what she thought.

As Miriam stood upon the little mound within the shadow of her
roof-tree, eagerly scanning the moors for Matt's return, cool airs
laden with moorland scents played around her, and masses of snowy
cloud sailed along the horizon, flushing beneath the touch of the
after-glow with as pure a rose as that mantling on her womanly
face. The blue distances overhead were deepening with sundown, and
the great sweeps of field and wild were sombre with the hill
shadows that began to fall. In a copse near where she stood a
little bird was busy with her fledglings, and from a meadow came
the plaintive bleat of a late yeaned lamb. From the distant
village the wind carried to her ears the cry of an infant--a cry
that lingered and echoed and started strange melodies in the
awakening soul of Miriam. Child of the hills as she was, never
before in all her thirty years of familiarity with them, and
freedom among them, had she seen and felt them as now. A great and
holy passion was upon her, and she took all in through the medium
of its golden haze. The early flowers at her feet glowed like
stars of hope and promise--and the bursting buds of the trees told
of spring's teeming womb and dew of youth; while the shadow of her
cottage gable and chimney--falling as it did across the little
mound on which she stood--recalled to her the pro