head. Lastly she turned her eyes, with almost dreadful
courage, upon the mutilated, malformed limbs, upon the feet--set right
up where the knee should have been, thus dwarfing the child by a fourth
of his height. She observed them, handled, felt them. And as she did
so, her mother-love, which, until now, had been but a part and
consequence--since the child was his gift, the crown and outcome of
their passion, his and hers--of the great love she bore her husband,
became distinct from that, an emotion by itself, heretofore unimagined,
pervasive of all her being. It had none of the sweet self-abandon, the
dear enchantments, the harmonising sense of safety and repose which
that earlier passion had. This was altogether different in character,
and made quite other demands on mind and heart. For it was fierce,
watchful, anxious, violent with primitive instinct; the roots of it
planted far back in that unthinkable remoteness of time, when the
fertile womb of the great earth mother began to bring forth the first
blind, simple forms of those countless generations of living creatures
which, slowly differentiating themselves, slowly developing, have
peopled this planet from that immeasurable past to the present hour.
Love between man and woman must be forever young, even as Eros, Cupid,
Krishna, are forever youthful gods. But mother-love is of necessity
mature, majestic, ancient from the stamp of primal experience which is
upon it.

And so, at this juncture, realising that which her motherhood meant,
her immaturity, her girlhood fell away from Katherine Calmady. Her life
and the purpose of it moved forward on another plane.

She bent down and solemnly kissed the unlovely, shortened limbs, not
once or twice, but many times, yielding herself up with an almost
voluptuous intensity to her own emotion. She clasped her hands about
her knees, so that the child might be enclosed, overshadowed, embraced
on all sides by the living defenses of its mother's love. Alone there,
with no witnesses, she brooded over it, crooned to it, caressed it with
an insatiable hunger of tenderness.

"And yet, my poor pretty, if we had both died, you and I, ten days
ago," she murmured, "how far better. For what will you say to me when
you grow older--to me who have brought you, without any asking or will
of yours, into a world in which you must always be at so cruel a
disadvantage? How will you bear it all when you come to face it for
yourself, and I can no