"Who can tell that? It may be for good or for harm. Yet we have a right to be hopeful."
"You make me most curious. How shall I view it, I wonder?"
"Well, you ought to be rather pleased, if you've told me the truth. And—look!"
A meteor gleamed across the misty moonlight. It seemed to streak the sky with radiance, was reflected for an instant in the pond among the rhododendrons, then vanished.
"D'you know what that means?" asked Honor.
"A wandering atom from some old, ruined world perhaps, now burnt up in our atmosphere."
"And do new-born souls come wandering from old, ruined worlds, I wonder? The German folk say that a shooting-star means a new life brought down from above, Myles. And—and how I do wish next May was come and gone; and if it's a girl, my dear one, I believe I shall go mad with disappointment."
So new fires were lighted in the man's deep heart, and blazed aloft like a signal of great joy and thanksgiving. His first impulse was to cuddle her to his breast; then he felt her to be a holy thing henceforth, separated from him by a veil impenetrable.
Long after his wife slept he lay in thought, and his spirit was much exalted, and his grey mind filled to bursting with sense of unutterable obligations. Nature was not enough to thank; she alarmed him rather, for, upon the approach of such experience, men fear the impassive Earth-Mother as well as love her. But that night he felt with unusual acuteness the sense of the vague power behind; and it pressed him on to his knees for a long, silent, wordless hour with his soul—an hour of petition and thanksgiving, of renewed thanksgiving and renewed petition.
CHAPTER IV.