I thought of how this had taken the sting out of death and victory out of the grave. And after that I told myself that, however sweet and beautiful, all this had been selfishness and I must put it away.
Then I thought of the child itself, who—conceived in sin as my Church would say, disinherited by the law, outlawed by society, inheriting my physical weaknesses, having lost one of its parents and being liable to lose the other—was now in danger of being left to the mercies of the world, banned from its birth, penniless and without a protector, to become a drudge and an outcast or even a thief, a gambler, or a harlot.
This was what I thought and felt.
And when at last I knew that I had come to the end of my appointed time I knelt down in my sad room, and if ever I prayed a fervent prayer, if ever my soul went up to God in passionate supplication, it was that the child I had longed for and looked forward to as a living link with my lost one might be born dead.
"Oh God, whatever happens to me, let my baby be born dead—I pray, I beseech Thee."
Perhaps it was a wicked prayer. God knows. He will be just.
EIGHTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER
It was Saturday, the seventh of June. The summer had been a cold one thus far; the night was chill and heavy rain was beating against the window-pane.
There was a warm fire in my room for the first time for several months; the single gas jet on the window side of the mantelpiece had been turned low, and the nurse, in list slippers, was taking my little flannel and linen garments out of the chest of drawers and laying them on the flat steel fender.