atly
ashamed--before.'

His heart sank through a pause, and still lower at his mother's question,
spoken very low.

'Then I am to know that though I should question, you would refuse an
answer to me?'

He could not bear to utter the word till she insisted.

Her face twitched painfully; she put him back, rose, and went pacing to
and fro. Helplessly he stood and watched her strange distress, till she
turned to him again.

'My boy--no--you can be a boy no more; this day I must see you are a man.
Listen, Christian: I knew this day must come--though it seems oversoon to
me--and I was resolved that so soon as you should refuse any confession
to me, I--I--must make confession to you.'

She silenced his pained protest, and went on.

'When my child was born, eighteen years ago come Christmas Eve, our
priest was no worthy man as now; little good was known of him, and there
was bad guessed at. But there was this that none here guessed--I only.
And you must know--it is part of my confession.'

She spoke painfully, sentence by sentence. After eighteen years her voice
yet vibrated with hot, live passion.

'My sister--my young sister--came to make her home with us; she would,
and then she would not, for no cause--and went away. She died--she died
on the night my child was born--and hers. Then I vowed that neither I nor
my child should receive sacrament of God from that man's hands. He dared
no word when I passed by with my unbaptized child in my arms; he met my
eyes once--never after. We were two living rebukes, that he but no other
could read plain enough. 'Twas in those days that my man Giles went
seafaring, so the blame was the more all mine. He indeed, knowing all
from me, would have had the child away to be baptized of other hands. But
in those days the nearest were far, and I put him off with this plea and
that; and come a day, and gone in a day, and months away, was the way
with him then. For this thwart course, begun out of fierce resentment, so
long as that did not abate, I found I had no will to leave. Yet all along
I never meant to hold it over a week more, or a week more, or at most a
month more. So two years went, and a third drew on, and that wolf of the
fold was dead.

'On the day he was laid underground God took my child from me.

'I knew--the first word of missing--I knew what I had done. Conscience
struck away all hope. From the print of children's feet we traced how
the smallest went straying, how litt