er child, and is
in this house on her way to destroy her. The birth of children is in her
eyes the death of their parents, and every new generation the enemy of
the last. Her daughter appears to her an open channel through which her
immortality--which yet she counts self-inherent--is flowing fast away:
to fill it up, almost from her birth she has pursued her with an utter
enmity. But the result of her machinations hitherto is, that in the
region she claims as her own, has appeared a colony of children, to
which that daughter is heart and head and sheltering wings. My Eve
longed after the child, and would have been to her as a mother to her
first-born, but we were then unfit to train her: she was carried into
the wilderness, and for ages we knew nothing of her fate. But she was
divinely fostered, and had young angels for her playmates; nor did she
ever know care until she found a baby in the wood, and the mother-heart
in her awoke. One by one she has found many children since, and that
heart is not yet full. Her family is her absorbing charge, and never
children were better mothered. Her authority over them is without
appeal, but it is unknown to herself, and never comes to the surface
except in watchfulness and service. She has forgotten the time when she
lived without them, and thinks she came herself from the wood, the first
of the family.

"You have saved the life of her and their enemy; therefore your life
belongs to her and them. The princess was on her way to destroy them,
but as she crossed that stream, vengeance overtook her, and she would
have died had you not come to her aid. You did; and ere now she would
have been raging among the Little Ones, had she dared again cross the
stream. But there was yet a way to the blessed little colony through the
world of the three dimensions; only, from that, by the slaying of her
former body, she had excluded herself, and except in personal contact
with one belonging to it, could not re-enter it. You provided the
opportunity: never, in all her long years, had she had one before. Her
hand, with lightest touch, was on one or other of your muffled feet,
every step as you climbed. In that little chamber, she is now watching
to leave it as soon as ever she may."

"She cannot know anything about the door!--she cannot at least know how
to open it!" I said; but my heart was not so confident as my words.

"Hush, hush!" whispered the librarian, with uplifted hand; "she can hear
thr