ural was the first outburst of a mother's
love; so, although she treasured up the warning, she ceased to
affright herself for what had already gushed forth.

"Now go to sleep, Ruth," said Miss Benson, kissing her, and darkening
the room. But Ruth could not sleep; if her heavy eyes closed, she
opened them again with a start, for sleep seemed to be an enemy
stealing from her the consciousness of being a mother. That one
thought excluded all remembrance and all anticipation, in those first
hours of delight.

But soon remembrance and anticipation came. There was the natural
want of the person, who alone could take an interest similar in kind,
though not in amount, to the mother's. And sadness grew like a giant
in the still watches of the night, when she remembered that there
would be no father to guide and strengthen the child, and place him
in a favourable position for fighting the hard "Battle of Life." She
hoped and believed that no one would know the sin of his parents, and
that that struggle might be spared to him. But a father's powerful
care and mighty guidance would never be his; and then, in those hours
of spiritual purification, came the wonder and the doubt of how far
the real father would be the one to whom, with her desire of heaven
for her child, whatever might become of herself, she would wish
to entrust him. Slight speeches, telling of a selfish, worldly
nature, unnoticed at the time, came back upon her ear, having
a new significance. They told of a low standard, of impatient
self-indulgence, of no acknowledgment of things spiritual and
heavenly. Even while this examination was forced upon her, by the new
spirit of maternity that had entered into her, and made her child's
welfare supreme, she hated and reproached herself for the necessity
there seemed upon her of examining and judging the absent father of
her child. And so the compelling presence that had taken possession
of her wearied her into a kind of feverish slumber; in which she
dreamt that the innocent babe that lay by her side in soft ruddy
slumber had started up into man's growth, and, instead of the pure
and noble being whom she had prayed to present as her child to "Our
Father in heaven," he was a repetition of his father; and, like him,
lured some maiden (who in her dream seemed strangely like herself,
only more utterly sad and desolate even than she) into sin, and
left her there to even a worse fate than that of suicide. For Ruth
believed th