fternoon sunshine, southward towards Chiusi and Rome.

And Katherine Calmady sat quietly amid the noise and violent,
on-rushing movement, making up accounts with her own motherhood. That
she might never see Dickie again, she herself dying, was an idea which
had grown not unfamiliar to her during these last sad years. But that
she should survive, only to see Dickie dead, was a new idea and one
which joined hands with despair, since it constituted a conclusion big
with the anguish of failure to the tragedy of their relation, hers and
his. Her whole sense of justice, of fitness, rebelled under it,
rebelled against it. She implored a space, however brief, of
reconciliation and reunion before the supreme farewell was said. But it
had become natural to Katherine's mind, so unsparingly self-trained in
humble obedience to the divine ordering, not to stay in the
destructive, but pass on to the constructive stage. She would not
indulge herself in rebellion, but rather fashion her thought without
delay to that which should make for inward peace. And so now, turning
her eyes, in thought, from the present, she went back on the baby-love,
the child-love which, notwithstanding the abiding smart of Richard's
deformity, had been so very exquisite to her. Upon the happier side of
all that she had not dared to dwell during this prolonged period of
estrangement. It was too poignant, too deep-seated in the springs of
her physical being. To dwell on it enervated and unnerved her. But now,
Richard the grown man dying, she gave herself back to Richard the
little child. It solaced her to do so. Then he had been wholly hers.
And he was wholly hers still, in respect of that early time. The man
she had lost--so it seemed, how far through fault of her own she could
not tell. And just now she refused to analyse all that. Upon all which
strengthened endurance, upon gracious memories engendering
thankfulness, could her mind alone profitably be fixed. And so, as the
train roared southward, and the sun declined and the swift dusk spread
its mantle over the face of the classic landscape, Katherine cradled a
phantom baby on her knee, and sat in the oriel window of the
Chapel-Room, at Brockhurst, with the phantom of her boy beside her,
while she told him old-time legends of war, and of high endeavour, and
of gallant adventure, watching the light dance in his eyes as her words
awoke in him emulation of those masters of noble deeds whose exploits
she recount