cheeks. "You thought," she said, almost sternly, "that
I did not love my child."

"No," I said, half untruthfully.

"I can hardly wonder," she continued, more sadly, "for it is only what I
have said to myself a thousand times. Sometimes I think that I have
lived in a dream, and one that few share with me. I have questioned
others, and never yet found a woman who did not admit that her child was
more to her, in her secret soul, than her husband. What can they mean?
Such a thought is foreign to my nature."

"Why separate the two?" I asked.

"I _must_ separate them," she answered, with the air of one driven to
bay by her own self-reproaching. "I had, like other young girls, my
dream of love and marriage. Unlike all the rest, I believe, my visions
were fulfilled. The reality was more than the imagination; and I thought
it would be so with my love for my child. The first cry of that baby
told the difference to my ear. I knew it all from that moment; the bliss
which had been mine as a wife would never be mine as a mother. If I had
not known what it was to love my husband, I might have been content with
my love for Marian. But look at that exquisite creature as she lies
there asleep, and then think that I, her mother, should desert her if
she were dying, for aught I know, at one word from him!"

"Your feeling is morbid," I said, hardly knowing what to answer.

"What good does it serve to know that?" she said, defiantly. "I say it
to myself every day. Once when she was ill, and was given back to me in
all the precious helplessness of babyhood, there was such a strange
sweetness in it, I thought the charm might remain; but it vanished when
she could run about once more. And she is such a healthy, self-reliant
little thing," added Laura, glancing toward the bed with a momentary
look of motherly pride that seemed strangely out of place amid these
self-denunciations.

"I wish her to be so," she added. "The best service I can do for her is
to teach her to stand alone. And at some day," continued the beautiful
woman, her whole face lighting up with happiness, "she may love as I
have loved."

"And your husband," I said, after a pause,--"does your feeling represent
his?"

"My husband," she said, "lives for his genius, as he should. You that
know him, why do you ask?"

"And his heart?" I said, half frightened at my own temerity.

"Heart?" she answered. "He loves _me_."

Her color mounted higher yet; she had a look of prid