went to the
sitting-room. "I want to mark my rug yet this evening and your noise
bothers me."

CHAPTER XI

"THE BRIGHT LEXICON OF YOUTH"

"WHAT shall I sing?" Phoebe asked as her father sank into the big rocker
and she took her place at the low organ.

"Ach, anything," he replied.

She smiled, turned the pages of an old music book, and began to sing,
"Annie Laurie." Her father nodded approval and smiled when she followed
that with several other old-time favorites. Then she hesitated a moment,
a low melody came from the organ, and the words of the beautiful lullaby
fell from her lips:

"Sweet and low, sweet and low,
Wind of the western sea;
Low, low,--breathe and blow,
Wind of the western sea;
Over the rolling waters go,
Come from the dying moon and blow,
Blow him again to me,
While my little one, while my pretty one sleeps."

Phoebe sang the lullaby as gently as if a tiny head were nestled against
her bosom. She had within her, as has every normal, unspoiled woman, the
loving impulses and yearning tenderness of motherhood. Her womanhood's
star of hope shone brightly, though from a great distance; she devoutly
hoped for the fulfillment of her destiny, but always dreamed of it
coming in some time far removed from the present. Wifehood and
motherhood--that was her goal, but long years of other joys and other
achievements stretched between. Yet she felt an incomparable joy as she
sang the lullaby. She sang it easily and sweetly and uttered each word
with the freedom of one to whom music is second nature.

To the man who listened memory drew aside the curtains of twenty years.
He beheld again the sweet-faced wife glorified with the blessed halo of
motherhood. He thrilled at the remembrance of her intense rapture as she
clasped her babe in moments of vivid ecstasy, or held it tenderly in her
arms as she sang the slumber song. The man was lost in revery--the sweet
voice of the mother had suddenly grown weak and drifted into silence--a
silence which would have been intolerable save for the lisping of a
child voice that was filled with the same indefinable sweetness the
treasured, silenced voice had possessed. In those first days of
bereavement Jacob Metz had clung to his motherless babe for comfort; her
love and caresses had renewed his strength and touched him with a divine
sense of his responsibility. His toil-hardened hands co