with the little one. Charles gazed suspiciously around
the small, neat room.

Not until he had assured himself that he was alone did he look closely
at the son who lay with flushed cheeks on the white pillows of his
little bed in the sound slumber of childhood.

Rarely had he seen a more beautiful boy. How finely chiselled were these
childish features, how thick and wavy the curls that clustered around
his head! The golden lustre which shone from them had also brightened
his mother's hair. And the smile on the cherry lips of the slightly open
mouth. That, too, was familiar to him. The child had inherited it from
Barbara. Memories which had long since paled in his soul, oppressed by
suffering and disappointment, regained their vanished forms and colours,
and for the first time in many months a smile hovered upon his lips.

What an exquisite image of the Creator was this child! and he might call
it his own, and if, as he intended, it grew up an innocent, happy
lad, it would also become a genuine man, with a warm heart and simple,
upright nature, not a moving marble figure, inflated by pompous
self-conceit, incapable of any deep feeling, any untrammelled emotion,
like his son Philip. Then it might happen that from love, from a real
living impulse of the heart, he would fall upon his neck; then----

He stretched both hands towards the little bed and, obeying a mighty
impulse of paternal affection, bent toward the boy to kiss him. But ere
his lips touched the child's he again gazed around him like a thief who
is afraid of being caught. At last he yielded to the longing which urged
him, and kissed little John--his, yes, his own son--first on his high,
open brow, and then on his red lips.

How sweet it was! Yet while he confessed this a painful emotion blended
with the pleasure.

He had again thought of Barbara, of her first kiss and the other joys
of the fairest May-time of his life, and the anxious fear stole upon him
that he might give sin a power over his soul which, after undergoing a
heavy penance, he thought he had broken.

Nothing, nothing at all, he now said to himself, ought to bind him to
the woman whom he had effaced from the book of his life as unworthy,
rebellious, lost to salvation; and, in a totally different mood, he
again gazed at the child. It already wore the semblance of an angel in
the gracious Virgin's train, and it should be dedicated to her and her
divine Son.

Then the boy drew his little arm