's greatest mystery.

I thought of how Martin had been taken from me, as Fate (perhaps for
some good purpose still unrevealed) had led me to believe.

I thought of how I had comforted myself with the hope of the child that
was coming to be a link between us.

I thought of the sweet hours I had spent in making my baby's clothes; in
choosing her name; in whispering it to myself, yes, and to God, too,
every night and every morning.

I thought of how day by day I had trimmed the little lamp I kept burning
in the sanctuary within my breast where my baby and I lived together.

I thought of how this had taken the sting out of death and victory out
of the grave. And after that I told myself that, however sweet and
beautiful, _all this had been selfishness and I must put it away_.

Then I thought of the child itself, who--conceived in sin as my Church
would say, disinherited by the law, outlawed by society, inheriting my
physical weaknesses, having lost one of its parents and being liable to
lose the other--was now in danger of being left to the mercies of the
world, banned from its birth, penniless and without a protector, to
become a drudge and an outcast or even a thief, a gambler, or a harlot.

This was what I thought and felt.

And when at last I knew that I had come to the end of my appointed time
I knelt down in my sad room, and if ever I prayed a fervent prayer, if
ever my soul went up to God in passionate supplication, it was that the
child I had longed for and looked forward to as a living link with my
lost one _might be born dead_.

"Oh God, whatever happens to me, let my baby be born dead--I pray, I
beseech Thee."

Perhaps it was a wicked prayer. God knows. He will be just.

EIGHTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER

It was Saturday, the seventh of June. The summer had been a cold one
thus far; the night was chill and heavy rain was beating against the
window-pane.

There was a warm fire in my room for the first time for several months;
the single gas jet on the window side of the mantelpiece had been turned
low, and the nurse, in list slippers, was taking my little flannel and
linen garments out of the chest of drawers and laying them on the flat
steel fender.

I think I must have had intervals of insensibility, for the moments of
consciousness came and went with me, like the diving and rising of a
sea-bird in the midst of swelling waves.

At one such moment I became aware that the doctor and my Welsh landlad