uched all who came near her
with the softness of a caress. She moved surrounded by an invisible
atmosphere of Love. Love was in her wide-opened brown eyes, Love--the
dim reflection of that descending crown poised over her head--radiated
in a faint lustre from her dark, thick hair. Around her beautiful neck,
sloping to her shoulders with full, graceful curves, Love lay encircled
like a necklace--Love that was beyond words, sweet, breathed from
her parted lips. From her white, large arms downward to her pink
finger-tips--Love, an invisible electric fluid, disengaged itself,
subtle, alluring. In the velvety huskiness of her voice, Love vibrated
like a note of unknown music.

Annixter, her uncouth, rugged husband, living in this influence of a
wife, who was also a mother, at all hours touched to the quick by this
sense of nobility, of gentleness and of love, the instincts of a father
already clutching and tugging at his heart, was trembling on the verge
of a mighty transformation. The hardness and inhumanity of the man was
fast breaking up. One night, returning late to the Ranch house, after
a compulsory visit to the city, he had come upon Hilma asleep. He had
never forgotten that night. A realization of his boundless happiness in
this love he gave and received, the thought that Hilma TRUSTED him, a
knowledge of his own unworthiness, a vast and humble thankfulness that
his God had chosen him of all men for this great joy, had brought him
to his knees for the first time in all his troubled, restless life
of combat and aggression. He prayed, he knew not what,--vague words,
wordless thoughts, resolving fiercely to do right, to make some return
for God's gift thus placed within his hands.

Where once Annixter had thought only of himself, he now thought only of
Hilma. The time when this thought of another should broaden and widen
into thought of OTHERS, was yet to come; but already it had expanded to
include the unborn child--already, as in the case of Mrs. Dyke, it had
broadened to enfold another child and another mother bound to him by no
ties other than those of humanity and pity. In time, starting from this
point it would reach out more and more till it should take in all men
and all women, and the intolerant selfish man, while retaining all
of his native strength, should become tolerant and generous, kind and
forgiving.

For the moment, however, the two natures struggled within him. A fight
was to be fought, one more, th