others use with children.
And Sylvia lay there, chilled, nerveless, silent, ignorant why her
sleeplessness had turned to restlessness, to loneliness, to an awakening
perception of what she lacked and needed and began to desire. For that
sad void, peopled at intervals through her brief years with a vague
mother-phantom, had, in the new crisis of her career, become suddenly an
empty desolation, frightening her with her own utter isolation. Fill it
now she could not, now that she needed that ghost of child-comfort,
that shadowy refuge, that sweet shape she had fashioned out of dreams to
symbolise a mother she had never known.

Driven she knew not why, she had crept from her room in search of the
still, warm, fragrant nest and the whispered reassurance and the caress
she had never before endured. Yes, now she craved it, invited it,
longed for safe arms around her, the hovering hand on her hair. Was this
Sylvia?

And Grace Ferrall, clearing her sleepy eyes, amazed, incredulous of the
cold, child-like hands upon her shoulders, caught her in her arms with
a little laugh and sob and drew her to her breast, to soothe and caress
and reassure, to make up to her all she could of what is every child's
just heritage.

And for a long while Sylvia, lying there, told her nothing--because
she did not know how--merely a word, a restless question half ashamed,
barely enough to shadow forth the something stirring her toward an
awakening in a new world, where with new eyes she might catch glimpses
of those dim and splendidly misty visions that float through sunlit
silences when a young girl dreams awake.

And at length, gravely, innocently, she spoke of her engagement, and the
worldly possibilities before her; of the man she was to marry, and her
new and unexpected sense of loneliness in his presence, now that she had
seen him again after months.

She spoke, presently, of Siward--a fugitive question or two, offered
indifferently at first, then with shy persistence and curiosity, knowing
nothing of the senseless form flung face downward across the sheets in
a room close by. And thereafter the murmured burden of the theme was
Siward, until one, heavy eyed, turned from the white dawn silvering the
windows, sighed, and fell asleep; and one lay silent, head half buried
in its tangled gold, wide awake, thinking vague thoughts that had no
ending, no beginning. And at last a rosy bar of light fell across the
wall, and the warm shadows faded fr