t courage of her eyes. Her calm, steadfast
face showed that she was not given to depression, but nevertheless this
evening, as she stood watching for her husband's return, for the first
distant speck of him where the cart-rut vanished into the plain, a sense
of impending misfortune enfolded her with the dusk. Was it because the
first snow had fallen? Ah me! how much it meant. It was as significant
for her as the grey pallor that falls on a sick man's face. It meant the
endless winter, the greater isolation instead of the lesser, the
powerlessness to move hand or foot in that all-enveloping shroud; the
struggle, not for existence--with him beside her that was assured--not
for luxury, she had ceased to care for it, though he had not ceased to
care for her sake, but for life in any but its narrowest sense. Books,
letters, human speech, through the long months these would be almost
entirely denied her. The sudden remembrance of the larger needs of life
flooded her soul, touching to momentary semblance of movement many
things long cherished, but long since dead, like delicate sea-plants
beyond high-water mark, that cannot exist between the long droughts when
the spring tide does not come. She had known what she was doing when,
against the wishes of her family, she of the South had married him of
the North, when she left the busy city life she knew, and clave to her
husband, following him over the rim of the world, as women will follow
while they have feet to follow with. She was his superior in birth,
cultivation, refinement, but she had never regretted what she had done.
The regrets were his for her, for the poverty to which he had brought
her, and to which she had not been accustomed. She had only one regret,
if such a thin strip of a word as regret can be used to describe her
passionate, controlled desolation, immense as the prairie, because she
had no child. Perhaps if they had had children the walls of the log hut
in the waste might have closed in on them less rigidly. It might have
become more of a home.

Her mind had taken its old mechanical bent, the trend of long habit, as
she looked out from that low window. How often she had stood there and
thought "If only we might have had a child!" And now, by sheer force of
habit, she thought it yet again. And then a slow rapture took possession
of her whole being, mounted, mounted till she leaned against the window
still faint with joy. She was to have a child after all. She h