, and
melted into unintelligible cries above him, never minding Mrs. Faith,
for I quite forgot her.

But what I felt was for my child's poor mother, and all my thought was
for her, and my heart broke for her, that she should be so bereft.

"I should like to know if you suppose for one minute that she wouldn't
_rather_ you would have the little fellow, if he is the least bit of
comfort to you in the world?"

Mrs. Faith said this; she spoke with a kind of lofty, feminine scorn.

"Why, Helen _loves_ you!" she said, superbly.

CHAPTER XIII

"I believe," said my old patient, "I believe that was the highest
moment of your life."

A man of my sort seldom comprehends a woman of hers. I did not
understand her, and I told her so, looking at her across the clinging
child.

"There was no self in it!" she answered eagerly.

"Oh," I said indifferently, "is that all?"

"It is everything," replied the wiser spirit, "in the place that we
have come to. It is like a birth. Such a moment has to go on living.
One is never the same after as one was before it. Changes follow. May
the Lord be in them!"

"But stay!" I cried, as she made a signal of farewell, "are you not
going to help me--is nobody going to help me take care of this child?"

She shook her head, smiling; then laughed outright at my perplexity;
and with a merry air of enjoyment in my extraordinary position, she
went her ways and left me.

There now began for me a singular life. Changes followed, as Mrs.
Faith had said. The pains and the privileges of isolation were
possible to me no longer. Action of some sort, communion of some kind
with the world in which I lived, became one of the imperative
necessities about which men do not philosophize. For there was the
boy! Whatever my views about a spiritual state of existence, there
always was the boy. No matter how I had demonstrated the
unreasonableness of living after death, the child was alive. However I
might personally object to my own share of immortality, I was a living
father, with my motherless baby in my arms.

Up to this time I had lived in an indifferent fashion; in the old
world, we should have called it "anyhow." Food I scarcely took, or if
at all, it was to snatch at such wild fruits as grew directly before
me, without regard to their fitness or palatableness; paying, in short,
as little attention to the subject as possible. Home I had none. I
wandered till I was weary of wanderi