plunge it in. In his turn he was silent; but his silence was scarcely
easier to bear than the harshest upbraiding. He stood there, gazing at
her, and she knew all that was in his mind, in his heart. And then,
after a moment, he went out of the room, still without a word. When he
came back, several hours later, he was very gentle to her, but Sheila
knew, nevertheless, that his father's heart condemned her, condemned
her as she condemned herself.

Together they nursed their son, with Mrs. Caldwell and old Lucindy to
help them. And as Sheila watched her baby fight for the tiny flame of
his life, her own heart, so much more burdened than Ted's, broke not
once, but a thousand times! He was so small, so weak, so helpless,
that little son of hers, and he suffered. That was what she felt she
could not bear--that he should suffer. Even his death she could endure
if she must, she who deserved to lose him. But his _pain_----!

As she went back and forth upon the ceaseless tasks of nursing,
apparently so concentrated upon them, she was in reality living over
days long past, the days before Eric's birth. Clear and practical as
was her grasp of the present and all its necessities, she was yet
obsessed by her memories of that time before her child's coming; by her
memories of it and her penitence for it. In the beginning, she had not
been glad. It was upon that, quite as much as upon her later
carelessness in trusting Lila, that her agonized conscience fixed. How
could she ever have hoped to keep her child--she who had not been glad
of his coming? It all sprang from that. For if she had been glad
enough in the beginning, the idea of writing would not have persisted
with her; would not finally have led her to that negligence for which
Eric might pay with his life.

She had not been glad in the beginning! Over and over that sentence
shrieked through her brain: She had not been glad in the beginning!
She had not been glad!

She never spared herself by reflecting that she had not been reluctant
for motherhood until Ted had shown his antagonism to the work that was
already the child of her brain, and Mrs. North had, from her different
viewpoint, justified his attitude. She never conceded in her behalf
that it had not even occurred to her, until then, to regard motherhood
and art as conflicting elements, and that it was the shock of seeing
them thus in her own life that had made her temporarily resentful of
maternity.