ings to common sense.

And he enumerated all the difficulties to her again and again, and
finally said to her: "You can't guess what troubles you may be
preparing for yourself. If the affection you now think you feel for the
child should not last? If he is not congenial to you when he grows
older? Bear in mind, he is and will always be the child you have
adopted."

But then she had almost flown into a passion. "How can you say such
things? Do you think I am narrow-minded? Whether it is my own child or
a child I have adopted is quite immaterial, as it becomes mine through
its training. I will train it in my own way. That it is of your own
flesh and blood has nothing to do with it. Am I only to love a child
because I have borne it? Oh no. I love the child because--because it is
so small, so innocent, because it must be so extremely sweet when such
a helpless little creature stretches out its arms to you." And she
spread out her arms and then folded them across her breast, as though
she was already holding a child to her heart. "You're a man, you do not
understand it. But you are so anxious to make me happy make me happy
now. Dear, darling husband, you will very soon forget that it is not
our own child, you will soon not remember it any more. It will say
'Father,' 'Mother' to us--and we will be its father and mother."

If she were right! He was silent, thrilled by a strange emotion. And
why should she not be right? A child that one trains according to one's
own method from its first year, that is removed entirely from the
surroundings in which it was born, that does not know but what it is
the child of its present parents, that learns to think with their
thoughts and feel with their feelings, cannot have anything strange
about it any more. It will become part of oneself, will be as dear, as
beloved as though one had begotten it oneself.

Pictures arose before his mind's eye which he no longer
expected to see, no longer ventured to hope for. He saw his smiling
wife with a smiling child on her lap; he saw himself smile, and felt a
pride he had never known when he heard its soft childish voice lisp:
"Fa-ther." Yes, Kate was right, all the other things that go by the
name of happiness are nothing compared to this happiness. Only a
father, a mother, knows what joy is.

He kissed his wife, and this kiss already meant half consent; she
felt that.

"Let us drive there to-morrow, the first thing to-morrow morning,"
she impl