ath. "I don't believe he would
care, your knowing it, if you never told anybody else, nor said anything
to him. Mother, I was going along, up there by the big rock where the
white birches grow, and I saw Ralph. . . . He was in front of a sort of
table he'd fixed up with a long piece of slate-stone, and he had some
queer-shaped stones on it . . . oh, _Mother_ . . . he was crying so, and
talking to himself! And when he saw me he got as mad! And he told me
about it, just as mad all the time, as though he was mad at me. Mother,
it's an altar!

"An altar!" said Marise, stupidly, utterly disconcerted by the word, so
totally other than what her fears had been foreboding.

"Yes, an altar, and he says the stones on it are idols, and he bows down
and worships them, the way the Bible says it's wicked to."

Marise was too much astonished to open her lips.

Paul said, "Mother, Ralph says he hates God, and isn't going to say his
prayers to him any more. He says God let his father and mother both get
killed, and he don't know what the devil could do any worse than that.
He said he started in having an altar to idols because he thought from
what the Bible said that if you did you'd be so wicked lightning would
strike you dead. But it didn't, and now he doesn't believe _any_thing.
So he's going on, having idols because the Bible says not to."

Marise's first rounded and exclusive emotion was of immense relief.
Nothing had happened to her own son, and beside this relief, nothing for
the moment seemed of any consequence. She drew Paul to her with a long
breath of what was, she recognized it the moment afterward, her old,
clear, undiluted, ferocious, hateful mother-egotism. For that instant
she had not cared an atom what happened to another woman's child, so
long as hers was safe.

But the next instant, the awareness of her hard heart cut across her
like the lash of a whip. She shrank under it, horrified. She hung her
head guilty and ashamed, divining the extremity of the other child's
misery.

As she sat there, with her living arms around her own little son, the
boy whose mother was dead came and stood before her in imagination,
showing those festering, uncared-for wounds of sorrow and bitterness and
loneliness, and furious, unavailing revolt from suffering too great to
be borne.

She felt the guilt driven out from her narrow heart as it swelled larger
to take him in. Any child who needed a mother so much, was _her own
child_. H