ine creditor who need not be paid. They even made it a
proof of reverence--a comfortable proof!--to place Him far above the
consideration they had to show their fellow men. This viewpoint was
impossible to Sheila. Morbid, hysterical, as her offered price for
Eric's life had been, she felt herself bound, and she paid
punctiliously.

It was easy enough thus to pay as she watched her child growing strong
and rosy again. His little life--Ah, what was it not worth? A dozen
times a day the memory of that night when she had believed that he
would die sent her shuddering to her knees with fresh prayers and
promises. And always the recollection of that loss escaped roused in
her a very passion of thanksgiving. She had her son!--that was her
answer to all the dreams which, unrealized, sometimes stole back to
tempt her with their wistful faces.

When Eric was well enough for her now and then to leave him--at first
she could not leave him lest, with her sheltering hands removed, his
life should flicker out--she gave burial to the little brain children
that, for the child of her body, she had sacrificed. Every bit of
verse, every little sketch, and the unfinished story which was, in her
sight, most guilty, and most dear of all, she laid away; not with
ribbon and lavender and rites of sentiment and tears, but sternly,
barely, ruthlessly, as one puts away things discarded by the heart
itself. She might have burned them less harshly, and that she did not
was only because she conceived it a finer deed to keep them and resist
them. So she put her honor to the uttermost test.

It was thus, and with her own hands, she poured her life into the mould
Ted had desired for it; it was thus she thrust from her all that did
not pertain to her husband and her child and her home. Yet between Ted
and herself not a word about it passed. He never reproached her for
what her writing had so nearly cost them; he never asked her to give it
up; he never even inquired as to whether she were still pursuing it.
He simply stood aloof from that element in her, with what queer mixture
of disapproval and pride and magnanimity she could but guess.

They continued to be happy together, the happier as the months passed
and Ted saw her more and more his and Eric's. In the beginning he had
probably thought that, after the shock of Eric's peril receded, Sheila
would try to write again; that fear must have lurked behind his
non-committal silence; but tim