—And the child?
—A boy. It lived less than a minute. . . . Yet a shapely child. . . .
Miss Quiney clasps her hands. Shall she, within her breast, thank God? She cannot. She hears the voice saying,—
A very shapely child. . . . But the labour was difficult. There was some pressure on the brain, some lesion.
They would have denied Ruth sight of the poor little body, but she stretched out her arms for it and insisted. Then as she held it, flesh of her flesh, to her breast and felt it cold, she—she, whose courage had bred wonder in them, even awe—she who had smiled between her pangs, murmuring pretty thanks—wailed low, and, burying her face, lay still.
Chapter VI.
CHILDLESS MOTHER.
In the sad and cheated days that followed, she, with the milk of motherhood wasting in her, saw with new eyes—saw many things heretofore hidden from her.
She did not believe in any scriptural God. But she believed—she could not help believing—in an awful Justice overarching all human life with its law, as it overarched the very stars in heaven. And this law she believed to rest in goodness, accessible to the pure conscience, but stern against the transgressor.
Because she believed this, she had felt that the marriage rite, with such an one as Mr. Silk for intercessor between her vows and a clean Heaven, could be but a sullying of marriage. Yes, and she felt it still; of this, at any rate, she was sure.