ible, are the best index
of the coming hour._"--EMERSON.

CHAPTER I

The day preceding Beth's birth was a grey day, a serene grey day, awesome
with a certain solemnity, and singularly significant to those who seek a
sign. There is a quiet mood, an inner calm, to which a grey day adds
peculiar solace. It is like the relief which follows after tears, when
hope begins to revive, and the warm blood throbs rebelliously to be free
of the shackles of grief; a certain heaviness still lingers, but only as
a luxurious languor which is a pleasure in itself. In other moods,
however, in pain, in doubt, in suspense, the grey day deepens the
depression of the spirits, and also adds to the sense of physical
discomfort. Mrs. Caldwell, looking up at noon from the stocking she was
mending, and seeing only a slender strip of level gloom above the houses
opposite, suddenly experienced a mingled feeling of chilliness and
dread, and longed for a fire, although the month was June. She could not
afford fires at that time of year, yet she thought how nice it would be
to have one, and the more she thought of it the more chilly she felt. A
little comfort of the kind would have meant so much to her that morning.
She would like to have felt it right to put away the mending, sit by a
good blaze with a book, and absorb herself in somebody else's thoughts,
for her own were far from cheerful. She was weak and ill and anxious,
the mother of six children already, and about to produce a seventh on an
income that would have been insufficient for four. It was a reckless
thing for a delicate woman to do, but she never thought of that. She
lived in the days when no one thought of the waste of women in this
respect, and they had not begun to think for themselves. What she
suffered she accepted as her "lot," or "The Will of God"--the expression
varied with the nature of the trouble; extreme pain was "The Will of
God," but minor discomforts and worries were her "lot." That much of the
misery was perfectly preventable never occurred to her, and if any one
had suggested such a thing she would have been shocked. The parson in
the pulpit preached endurance; and she understood that anything in the
nature of resistance, any discussion even of social problems, would not
only have been a flying in the face of Providence, but a most indecent
proceeding. She knew that there was crime and disease in the world, but
there were judges and juries to pursue crimina