The boy awoke--but was yet blinded by sleep; and the room was dim-lit.
He rubbed his eyes. The man and the woman stood rigid in the shadow.

"Is it you, mother?"

There was no resisting her command--her flashing eyes, the passionate
gesture. The man moved to the door, muttering that he would come
back--and disappeared. She closed the door after him.

"Yes, dear," she answered. "It is your mother."

"Was there a man with you?"

"It was Lord Wychester," she said, brightly, "seeing me home from the
party."

"Oh!" he yawned.

"Go to sleep."

He fell asleep at once. The stair creaked. The tenement was again
quiet....

He was lying in his mother's place in the bed.... She looked out upon
the river. Somewhere, far below in the darkness, the current still ran
swirling to the sea--where the lights go different ways.... The boy
was lying in his mother's place. And before she lifted him, she took
his warm little hand, and kissed his brow, where the dark curls lay
damp with the sweat of sleep. For a long, long time, she sat watching
him through a mist of glad tears. The sight of his face, the outline
of his body under the white coverlet, the touch of his warm flesh: all
this thrilled her inexpressibly. Had she been devout, she would have
thanked God for the gift of a son--and would have found relief....
When she crept in beside him, she drew him to her, tenderly still
closer, until he was all contained in her arms; and she forgot all
else--and fell asleep, untroubled.

[Illustration: Tailpiece to _At Midnight_]

[Illustration: Headpiece to _A Meeting by Chance_]

_A MEETING BY CHANCE_

Came, then, into the lives of these two, to work wide and immediate
changes, the Rev. John Fithian, a curate of the Church of the Lifted
Cross--a tall, free-moving, delicately spare figure, clad in spotless
black, with a hint of fashion about it, a dull gold crucifix lying
suspended upon the breast: pale, long of face, the eye-sockets deep and
shadowy; hollow-cheeked, the bones high and faintly touched with red;
with black, straight, damp hair, brushed back from a smooth brow and
falling in the perfection of neatness to the collar--the whole severe
and forbidding, indeed, but for saving gray eyes, wherein there lurked,
behind the patient agony, often displacing it, a tender smile,
benignant, comprehending, infinitely sympathetic, by which the gloomy
exterior was lightened and in some surprising way gra