lashed across the face,
relieving the deep disquiet, but the laugh was an effort of one who was
confronted by demolished fortunes. His whole look was that of a man who
has been shown some structural smallness of his own, shown beyond
doubt--his ranges of personal limitation, made clear and irrefutable.
He recognized his master in the woman opposite.... Yet powerful natural
elements within him were bearing upon the hateful revelation. They
sought to cover the puny nakedness, and make an hallucination of it
all. He was not evolved enough to accept the truth with humility.

* * * * *

The woman was psychically torn. The agony of her face cannot be
pictured, nor her martyrdom of sustaining courage. She could not see
the third Presence, but it was there _for her_. It was above her, yet
was called by her natural greatness. There was a line of luminous white
under her eyes, that left the lower part of her face in shadow. The
eyes were shining with that dissolving supernatural light, that comes
with terrible spiritual hunger. Her dark hair had fallen in disarray.

In the first transcendent happiness she had conceived a child. The
hideous disillusionment was now--months before the babe. And her
struggle at this moment of her heart's death--was to keep the madness
of sorrow from despoiling the child, that lay formative within--to
preserve the child whole, and in her original greatness of ideal, in
the midst of her own destroying, and against the defiling commonness
that had just been revealed in the father....

She had crossed the last embankment of agony; her struggle was
finished. She had conquered. The Presence had come to hold her mind
true, in this passage through chaos.... Her own death she would have
welcomed, save that the babe must live. It had come to her as a
daybreak from heaven. It must not be crushed and weighted with this
tragedy of pure earth.... She held the blight from the child!

She _knew_ this. She arose and smiled. Into her soul had come a sense
of the amplitude of time--a promise of adoration--a blessing upon her
courage--a knowledge of her child's lustre. The Angel had whispered it.
Blithe, lifting, loving, the message had come to her from the Presence.

The man perceived that he had hurt her mortally; that his meaning to
her had vanished. He arose to approach her, but a gesture of her hand
made him sink again into the low chair. He seemed trying to realize
that she had