s, my
determinations. Do you know what a weapon a sound can be, Miss Alston?
Perhaps not. A sound can be like a sword and pierce you, like a bludgeon
and strike you down. A little sound can nestle in your life, and change
all the colour and all the meaning of it. The cry of the living child
was terrible to me, I thought then. But--then--I had never heard the cry
of the dead child. You see I wanted to forget something. And the tiny
cry of the child recalled it. There were no words in the cry, and yet
there were words,--so it seemed to me--telling over a past history. This
history--well, I want to say to you--"

Lily had now put a guard on watch over against her impulsive nature.
When Maurice stopped speaking she was able to look towards him again and
murmur:

"Say all you want to."

"Thank you," he said, almost eagerly. "If you knew--Miss Alston, before
this time, when I was a very young student, I had fallen into one of the
most fatal confusions of youth. I had made a mistake as to the greatest
need of my own nature. I had, for a flash of time, thought my greatest
need was love."

"And it wasn't," the girl said, with a note of wonder in her voice.

"No, it was success, to outstrip my fellows. But I thought it was love,
and I followed my thought and I sacrificed another to my thought. My
child's mother died almost in giving her to me, and, in dying, made me
promise to keep the child always with me. I kept that promise. I was a
young student, very poor. My love had been secret. Now I was alone with
this helpless child. I left my own lodgings and took others. I brought
it there, and its presence obliged me to shut my doors against my own
family and against my friends. To keep the door shut I put forward the
excuse of my ambition. I said that I was giving myself up to work and I
shut myself in with the child. I was its nurse as well as its father. I
thought I should be sufficient for it. But it missed--her, whom I
scarcely missed."

"You had not loved her?"

Maurice bent his head.

"I had made a mistake, as I said. I had only thought so. Long before she
died I had almost hated her for crippling my ambition. She was swept out
of my path. But the child was left crying for her."

"Yes. I know."

"Its wail came eternally between me and my great desire. When I sat down
to work the sound--which I could not quiet--perplexed my brain. When I
lay down to get, in sleep, power for fresh work, it struck through my
dreams.