. I needed no doctor to say what had
befallen me. It was something more stupendous for me than the removal of
mountains or the stopping of the everlasting coming and going of the
sea.

The greatest of the mysteries of womanhood, the most sacred, the most
divine, the mighty mystery of a new life had come to me as it comes to
other women. Yet how had it come? Like a lowering thunderstorm.

That golden hour of her sex, which ought to be the sweetest and most
joyful in a woman's life--the hour when she goes with a proud and
swelling heart to the one she loves, the one who loves her, and with her
arms about his neck and her face hidden in his breast whispers her great
new secret, and he clasps her more fondly than ever to his heart,
because another and closer union has bound them together--that golden
hour had come to me, and there was none to share it.

O God! O God! How proudly I had been holding up my head! How I had been
trampling on the conventions of morality, the canons of law, and even
the sacraments of religion, thinking Nature, which had made our hearts
what they are, did not mean a woman to be ashamed of her purest
instincts!

And now Nature herself had risen up to condemn me, and before long the
whole world would be joining in her cry.

If Martin had been there at that moment I do not think I should have
cared what people might think or say of a woman in my condition. But he
was separated from me by this time by thousands of miles of sea, and
was going deeper and deeper every day into the dark Antarctic night.

How weak I felt, how little, how helpless! Never for a moment did I
blame Martin. But I was alone with my responsibility, I was still living
in my husband's house, and--worst of all--another woman knew my secret.

SEVENTY-FOURTH CHAPTER

Early next day Doctor Conrad came to see me. I thought it significant
that he came in my father's big motor-car--a car of great speed and
power.

I was in my dressing-gown before the fire in the boudoir, and at the
first glance of his cheerful face under his iron-grey head I knew what
Alma had said in the letter which had summoned him.

In his soft voice he asked me a few questions, and though I could have
wished to conceal the truth I dared not. I noticed that his face
brightened at each of my replies, and at the end of them he said:

"There is nothing to be alarmed at. We shall be better than ever
by-and-by."

Then in his sweet and delicate way (as