bowed their tops under
their autumn load of red berries, so the heads of both husband and wife
were bowed under a flood of thoughts full of promise. The trees flew
quickly past the carriage as it rolled along, and so did their lives'
different stages past their agitated minds. Fifteen years of married
life--long years when one is expecting something first with confidence,
then with patience, then with faint-heartedness, then with longing,
with a longing that is kept more and more secret as the years go by,
and that becomes more and more burning on account of the secrecy. Now
the fulfilment was at hand--a fulfilment certainly different from what
husbands and wives who love each other picture to themselves, but still
a fulfilment.

That old sentence in the Bible came into the woman's mind and would
not be banished: _But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent
forth His Son._ Oh, this child from a strange, from an unknown land,
from a land that had neither fields nor fruits, and was not blessed
with rich harvests, this child was a gift from God, given by His
goodness. She bowed her head full of gratitude, as though she had
received a blessing.

And the man pressed his wife's hand gently, and she returned the
pressure. They remained sitting hand in hand. His glance sought hers
and she blushed. She loved him again as in the first year of her
marriage--no, she loved him much more now, for now, now he gave her the
happiness of her life, the child.

Her eyes that were full of bliss swept over the poor Venn district,
which looked brown and desolate, and which was still a fairyland full
of the most glorious wonders.

"Didn't I know it?" she murmured triumphantly, although trembling
with an agitation that was almost superstitious. "I felt
it--here--here."

She could hardly wait until they reached the village hi the Venn,
oh, how far away from the world it lay, so quite forgotten. And so
poor. But the poverty did not terrify her, nor the dirt--the result of
the poverty; she was going to take the child away with her now, to take
him where there was culture and prosperity, and he would never know
that he had lain on the bare ground instead of in a soft bed. She
thought of Moses. As he had been found in the bulrushes on the banks of
the Nile, so she had found him on the grass in the Venn--would he
become a great man like him? Desires, prayers, hopes, and a hundred
feelings she had not known before agitated her mind.