"To save you!" gasped Chérie. "Louise! Louise! Are you so ill?"
"My darling, my own dear child, I am worse than ill. But there is help for me; I shall be saved—saved from dishonour and despair." She lowered her voice. "Chérie!"—her voice fell so low that it could hardly be heard by the trembling girl beside her—"can you not understand? The shame I am called upon to face—the doom that awaits me—is maternity."
Maternity! Slowly, as if an unseen force uplifted her, Chérie had risen to her feet. Maternity!... The veil of the mystery was rent, the wonder was revealed! Maternity! That was the key to all her own strange and marvellous sensations, to the throb and the thrill within her! Maternity.
She stood motionless, amazed. A shaft of sunlight from the open window beat upon her, turning her hair to gold and her wide eyes to pools of wondering light. Such wonder and such light were about her that Louise gazed in awed silence at the ethereal figure, standing with pale hands extended and virginal face upturned.
She seemed to be listening.... To what voice? What annunciation did she harken to with those rapt eyes?
Louise called her by her name. But Chérie did not answer. Her lips were mute, her eyes were distant and unseeing. She heard no other voice but a child-voice asking from her the gift of life.
And to that voice her trembling spirit answered.
CHAPTER XVIII
Dr. Reynolds kept his promise to Louise.