The door was open, and through it he saw a bare room, the walls stained a deep yellow with ochre; a carpetless floor, comfortless but clean; a square table, with a coarse white cloth covering it, stood in the middle of the room; upon it was some food. Myron sat there alone, but there was another plate laid, beside which stood a battered tin mug. All this he took in at a glance, and then his eyes fastened upon the woman's face. She was as yet unconscious of his presence. She sat at the table in such position that the profile of her face was outlined sharply against the bright yellow of the walls.
Her face, as he beheld it thus for the first time in clear daylight, struck him with swift remembrance of an exquisite picture he had once seen, a meek-mouthed Madonna painted on a bright brass plaque. There was the same pose of head, the same heavy knot of nut-brown hair, the same outward sweep of the lashes from the same drooped lids, the same exquisite line where the cheek softened to the throat. But, alas! there was no heavenly nimbus round this living head, no holy glow of happy maternity, no pure halo of womanhood.
A MEEK-MOUTHED MADONNA.
At that moment Myron turned towards the doorway, and, as her eyes met his, his imagination suddenly supplied the aureole that before she seemed to lack, and, in completion of the picture, a stray line or two of poetry came back to him with all the happy force of applicability:
"Eh, sweet,
You have the eyes men choose to paint, you know;
And just that soft turn in the little throat,
And bluish color in the lower lid,
They make saints with."
He started as he realized that he was comparing the Madonna to this unblest mother—an ideal of saintly beauty to this sinning one. But all in an instant there came to him a swift certainty that this was not the face of an evil woman. This woman bore in her countenance the indelible lines of pain and suffering, the ineffaceable traces of bodily and mental anguish. She had been bowed beneath the burden of woman's inalienable heritage of agony, had lived through the Gethsemane of childbirth and won to the heights of motherhood's Golgotha—a child's grave. But in all this, remember, there is nothing vile; it is only infinitely pitiful.
Whilst he gazed and thought these things swiftly, she had risen from her place and stood with clasped hands and down-bent head—so like a prisoner awaiting sentence that he felt a great throb of pity. He took a step forward and held out his hand.
"I am going to the train," he said; "but I came away early, that I might see you."