still clung to her, whispering another strange thing.
"Often, when I am half awake, I remember some one--Not you, Mother. Some
one with a deep laugh, whose coat feels smooth on my cheek--who used to
toss me up in the air, and play with me, and pet me if I was frightened.
I always want to cry when he goes.--Is that my father, Mother?"

A pulse beat thickly in Kate's throat. She had some difficulty in
answering. "Perhaps. Who knows? A baby's dreams, dear. But cling to
them, cling to them--"

She knew very well it was not Jemima's father, but the man who should
have been her father, Jacques Benoix. So, after all, the first loves of
life are not forgotten, even by Jemimas....

Lying there, despite the depressing hour, content stole over her; a
feeling that all was well with her elder child, at least.

She turned her thoughts to Jacqueline. There, too, things were going
better. None of Philip's growing interest and tenderness for his little
playmate had escaped her notice. Motherwise, she exaggerated these into
symptoms of greater import. Blunderer that she was, she had at least
managed to bring the child safe through the perils of a first passion,
that rock upon which so many young lives wreck, even as hers had
wrecked. In the rebound from the affair with Channing, the girl could
not fail to appreciate the superior charm of Jacques' big and simple
son, who was so much like Jacques himself. She was sure that Jacqueline
already loved Philip without suspecting it. Women ere this have loved
two men at once.

Then, as suddenly as pain that has been waiting for the first motion on
the part of its victim to pounce, the apprehension she had been fighting
came back upon her, twofold.--_Was_ she so certain? And had she not in
her blundering life been certain of too many things? That she would be a
true wife to Basil Kildare, for instance; that she could justify Jacques
before the world; that at least she might atone to him for all he had
lost through her. And in each of these things she had been wrong. She,
with all her boast of efficiency, she the successful Mrs. Kildare of
Storm, what was she in the end but a failure--a wife whose husband had
not trusted her, a woman who had ruined her lover's life, a mother whose
daughter married without love, to get away from her?

She wondered, as at all such moments, what was the purpose for which she
had been created; or whether there had indeed been a purpose. This
humanity that takes i