seemed! She dropped on her knees
beside the lounge. No eloquence now! She stammered commonplace words
eagerly, pitifully.

"Mother dear! Mother, I didn't mean to hurt you so! I did n't know.
_I did n't know!_ Don't cry! O mother dear, _don't cry!_"

Clarissa lifted a drawn, woeful face, and looked straight into her
daughter's eyes. I cannot tell you what she saw there of wonder and
newborn {211} tenderness. But she drank of that look thirstily, as
might one who had found springs of living water after a desert
drought.

Her own child's hand had struck her down. Yet, in her overthrow, she
read in Marvel's face the sign all mothers seek. Ungentle and
unmerciful the girl had been, yet gentler and more merciful than she!
And by that token she knew her life not wasted utterly. For she had
given to this world--this piteous world for which she had labored
clumsily and ineffectually in alien ways--the best thing that the
woman has to give. Offspring a little better than herself she gave to
it. This child of hers, just now so hard, yet now become so pitiful,
was her own child and more. Of her flesh and of her spirit had been
wrought a finer thing than she.

------------------------------

_The Riverside Press_

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A

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By Richard Pryce

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ENCHANTED GROUND
An Episode in the Life of a Young Man
By HARRY JAMES SMITH

"An absorbing, dramatic, and sweet story ... a
problem novel with a solution."--_New York Times._