CHAPTER XIII
"I believe," said my old patient, "I believe that was the highest moment of your life."
A man of my sort seldom comprehends a woman of hers. I did not understand her, and I told her so, looking at her across the clinging child.
"There was no self in it!" she answered eagerly.
"Oh," I said indifferently, "is that all?"
"It is everything," replied the wiser spirit, "in the place that we have come to. It is like a birth. Such a moment has to go on living. One is never the same after as one was before it. Changes follow. May the Lord be in them!"
"But stay!" I cried, as she made a signal of farewell, "are you not going to help me—is nobody going to help me take care of this child?"
She shook her head, smiling; then laughed outright at my perplexity; and with a merry air of enjoyment in my extraordinary position, she went her ways and left me.
There now began for me a singular life. Changes followed, as Mrs. Faith had said. The pains and the privileges of isolation were possible to me no longer. Action of some sort, communion of some kind with the world in which I lived, became one of the imperative necessities about which men do not philosophize. For there was the boy! Whatever my views about a spiritual state of existence, there always was the boy. No matter how I had demonstrated the unreasonableness of living after death, the child was alive. However I might personally object to my own share of immortality, I was a living father, with my motherless baby in my arms.