settled. She should never speak to any one of what she knew. "Boy"
should have everything she could give him, all that was left of her
magic lamp. Even Archie could never exasperate her again enough to
endanger the child's future.

She turned down the night-light and tiptoed out of the room. To-morrow
she would move up here, even if she had to put the nurse in some other
place, and henceforth she would never be separated from her child. He
should stand between her and his father. She went to her rooms on the
lower floor, but before undressing she stepped out on the broad terrace,
which was now almost ready for the sod. The great wall was all but
finished--the corner by the orangery to be built up even with the rest.
As she came out from the shelter of the house the blast of wind caught
her thin dress and swept it out before her like a streamer. She had to
hold her hair to prevent the wind from unwinding it. She could see
nothing--the impalpable blackness reached far down into the depths of
the canon, far out into the space above the land and the sea. Usually
even on dark nights the hill behind the house brooded over the place
like a faint shadow, but to-night it was blotted out. The house was dark
except for the light in Archie's library at the other end of the terrace
and the faint candle gleam of the night-light in the nursery.

Adelle liked the black storm. It soothed her troubled mind by its sheer
force, passing through her like the will of a stronger being. Adelle was
growing, at last, after all these years of imperceptible change, of
spiritual stagnation. She had begun to grow with the coming of her
child, and these last weeks she had been growing fast. She even realized
that she was changing, was becoming another, unfamiliar person. She felt
it to-night more than at any time in all her life--the strangeness of
being somebody other than her familiar self. She said it was her
"experiences." It was, indeed, familiarity with Archie and his
disgusting weakness. It was her young cousin, the stone mason, and all
that the discovery of him as a person, as well as her relationship to
him and his claim upon her property, had meant. It was, of course, the
influence of creative motherhood upon her. But it was more than all
these combined that had started the belated growth of her soul, now that
she was twenty-five, married, and had a child. It was an unknown power
within her, like this mighty passionate wind, germinating lat