"

"Come back to the seat a moment--let me tell you my love again," urged the
mother. "Life still is dear while I hold your hand."

As they sat in brooding anguish, floating up from the river valley came
the music of a banjo in a negro cabin, mingled with vulgar shout and song
and dance. A verse of the ribald senseless lay of the player echoed above
the banjo's pert refrain:

"Chicken in de bread tray, pickin' up dough;
Granny, will your dog bite? No, chile, no!"

The mother shivered and drew Marion closer.

"Oh, dear! oh, dear! has it come to this--all my hopes of your beautiful
life!"

The girl lifted her head and kissed the quivering lips.

"With what loving wonder we saw you grow," she sighed, "from a tottering
babe on to the hour we watched the mystic light of maidenhood dawn in your
blue eyes--and all to end in this hideous, leprous shame. No--No! I will
not have it! It's only a horrible dream! God is not dead!"

The young mother sank to her knees and buried her face in Marion's lap in
a hopeless paroxysm of grief.

The girl bent, kissed the curling hair, and smoothed it with her soft
hand.

A sparrow chirped in the tree above, a wren twittered in a bush, and down
on the river's bank a mocking-bird softly waked his mate with a note of
thrilling sweetness. "The morning is coming, dearest; we must go," said
Marion. "This shame I can never forget, nor will the world forget. Death
is the only way."

They walked to the brink, and the mother's arms stole round the girl.

"Oh, my baby, my beautiful darling, life of my life, heart of my heart,
soul of my soul!"

They stood for a moment, as if listening to the music of the falls,
looking out over the valley faintly outlining itself in the dawn. The
first far-away streaks of blue light on the mountain ranges, defining
distance, slowly appeared. A fresh motionless day brooded over the world
as the amorous stir of the spirit of morning rose from the moist earth of
the fields below.

A bright star still shone in the sky, and the face of the mother gazed on
it intently. Did the Woman-spirit, the burning focus of the fiercest
desire to live and will, catch in this supreme moment the star's Divine
speech before which all human passions sink into silence? Perhaps, for she
smiled. The daughter answered with a smile; and then, hand in hand, they
stepped from the cliff into the mists and on through the opal gates of
death.

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