flict.

For she considered what her own unappeased gift had cost her--the
hunger, the restlessness, the pain. She considered how, throughout all
the years of her marriage, she had suffered her gift's insistence and
its reproach. She thought of how she had never been able to look upon
the miracle of the spring, the majesty of the stars, without an aching
heart. All beauty had been transmuted for her into unassuageable
sorrow--because she had been born to create beauty and had failed of
her destiny. And it would be transmuted into sorrow for Eric,
too--unless he were given the freedom she had foregone. He, too, would
face the stars with an aching heart; all high and exquisite creation
would be for him the material of suffering--unless he were allowed to
create also.

She had nerved herself to any effort, any struggle that might be
necessary, when Ted at last laid down Eric's story and turned to his
desk without a word. Was there as little hope as that?

"Ted?" she cried.

"Wait," he answered, rummaging in a drawer of his desk, with his back
toward her. And his voice sounded queer--almost as if it were choked
with tears. "Wait, Sheila."

He rose, directly, and walked toward her, and his face was queer, too,
unsteady with some rarely deep emotion. Thus he had looked when he
first bent over her after Eric's birth. That flashed through Sheila's
mind, touched her to sudden faith in his being, now, what she prayed to
have him. Then she saw that in his hand he had, not Eric's story, but
a bulky package of yellowed manuscripts, tied clumsily with a faded
ribbon. In such fashion a romantic man might have tied love letters.
But Ted was not romantic, and, never having been separated from him at
any time since their marriage, she had written him no letters.
Besides, these papers were large, business-like sheets. She stared at
them curiously. What had they to do with Eric and Eric's future?

But to Ted they had their significance. He carefully untied the dingy
ribbon and spread the loosened pages on the table before her--and she
noticed that his fingers were shaking.

"Look," he said, in that queer, blurred voice.

She picked up one of the discolored pages--and her own writing
confronted her; for the page was from the unfinished story she had been
working on when Eric was taken ill with scarlet fever--the story that,
in obedience to her vow, she had put aside, still uncompleted.

"Why, Ted--_Ted_--!" But eve