sedly, the word or two with which they sought to
detain me, but I ran away.

She had said that I knew women's hearts. God forgive her! What man on
earth can penetrate such things, can ever gauge the depths of them, see
all the wondrous beauty that may hide in them and blossom forth, full of
awe and wonder. Every one must worship something, if it be but an idea,
and my reverence goes out to the woman who exalts, to the mother of men,
to the consoler, for, when she is at her highest and best, she becomes
an object of veneration among such earthly things as we may bend a knee
to.

The man had remained strong in his abasement, and the woman had seen it.
She had been unembarrassed by my presence. Hers was the strength that
spurns all pettiness. She knew that I loved Gordon and was assured of my
regard for herself. If in her words there had been renunciation and the
casting away of wounded pride, if in them there had been the surging of
the great love that had long filled her heart, the whole world was
welcome to hear them and to behold her while she gave her troth again
into the man's keeping. She had risen above the smallness of
recrimination, and, with a gesture, had swept away the past since in it
there was nothing really shameful, nothing that could soil her ermine
coat of fair and clean womanhood. Her faith in the man had returned,
and, with it, the confidence born of her instinctive knowledge of a pure
woman's mastery over men. She knew that Gordon had beheld those visions
of hell that strengthen a man's dire need of heaven, and so, in all
simplicity and with the wondrous openhandedness of a Ceres sowing abroad
a world's supply of germinating seed, she had cast the treasure of
herself before him.

I jumped into a taxi and drove over to the little apartment where Baby
Paul was to lie motherless for a few days. I rang the bell and heard
Eulalie's heavy steps, hurrying to the door.

"Oh!" she exclaimed. "I am so glad you have come, but I was hoping it
was Monsieur the doctor!"

Whereat I rushed in, filled with alarm.

CHAPTER XXIV

"THE MOTHER AND CHILD"

Little Paul, as I immediately saw as soon as I looked at him, was very
ill. He had, of late, always shown pleasure at my coming; he had babbled
of simple things and of mysteries; his little arms spontaneously came to
me and I would take him in my arms and get moist kisses from his tiny
lips and dandle him and share in his ecstasies over woolly lambs.