She smiled, turned the pages of an old music book, and began to sing, "Annie Laurie." Her father nodded approval and smiled when she followed that with several other old-time favorites. Then she hesitated a moment, a low melody came from the organ, and the words of the beautiful lullaby fell from her lips:
"Sweet and low, sweet and low,
Wind of the western sea;
Low, low,—breathe and blow,
Wind of the western sea;
Over the rolling waters go,
Come from the dying moon and blow,
Blow him again to me,
While my little one, while my pretty one sleeps."
Phœbe sang the lullaby as gently as if a tiny head were nestled against her bosom. She had within her, as has every normal, unspoiled woman, the loving impulses and yearning tenderness of motherhood. Her womanhood's star of hope shone brightly, though from a great distance; she devoutly hoped for the fulfillment of her destiny, but always dreamed of it coming in some time far removed from the present. Wifehood and motherhood—that was her goal, but long years of other joys and other achievements stretched between. Yet she felt an incomparable joy as she sang the lullaby. She sang it easily and sweetly and uttered each word with the freedom of one to whom music is second nature.
To the man who listened memory drew aside the curtains of twenty years. He beheld again the sweet-faced wife glorified with the blessed halo of motherhood. He thrilled at the remembrance of her intense rapture as she clasped her babe in moments of vivid ecstasy, or held it tenderly in her arms as she sang the slumber song. The man was lost in revery—the sweet voice of the mother had suddenly grown weak and drifted into silence—a silence which would have been intolerable save for the lisping of a child voice that was filled with the same indefinable sweetness the treasured, silenced voice had possessed. In those first days of bereavement Jacob Metz had clung to his motherless babe for comfort; her love and caresses had renewed his strength and touched him with a divine sense of his responsibility. His toil-hardened hands could not do the mother's tasks for her but his heart could love sufficiently to recompense, so far as that be possible, for the loss of the mother's presence. His own childhood had been stripped of all romance, hence he could not measure the value of the innocent pleasures of which Aunt Maria, in her stern and narrow discipline, deprived the little girl; but so far as he saw the light and so far as he was able, he quietly soothed where Aunt Maria irritated, and mitigated by his interest and sympathy the sternness of the woman's rule.
A fleeting retrospect of the past years crowded upon him as he heard Phœbe sing the mother's song. The two voices seemed strangely merged and blended; when she ended and turned her face to him she seemed the vivid reincarnation of that other Phœbe.
"That's a pretty song, isn't it, daddy? You like it?"
"Yes. Your mom used to sing you to sleep with it."
"I wish I could remember. I can't remember her at all," the girl said wistfully.
"I wish you could, too. You look just like her. I'm glad you do. We Metz people all have the black hair and dark eyes but you have your mom's light hair and blue eyes. I see her every time I look at you."
She seated herself near him. In a moment he spoke again, very deliberately, with his characteristic expressiveness: