to melt in January, and the first emissary to Eagle's Gorge from the outside world was the postman with a telegram for Nasha.
"Volmer has died suddenly. I am coming back to you.—Ivo."
Coming back alone! Coming back to what? To a loving wife whose face was hideous, whose long figure was lean and ungainly, who lacked all the grace and attraction he had been bewitched into attributing to her. He was coming back to shocking disenchantment—perhaps to such disgust and loathing that he would make her bitter grief more bitter by cursing and forswearing her and her unborn child. Even so: she loved him well enough to bear all silence, to let him go, renounce, forget her, and to wear out her own heart in the solitary wilds of Eagle's Gorge, where none would intrude upon her desolation or remark her pain. Volmer was dead! Doubtless his life had flashed out in some swift disaster of his own occasioning, and there had been no time to set things right for her, so that her peace, her joy, her dream of continued happiness had vanished with him. The second effect of Ivo's message was to appal and stupefy her; but she soon reawakened to the full significance of the fatal words. She understood all they meant, and all the years to come would mean, and she was driven near to frenzy.
"Oh, God! let me keep him! Let me be always beautiful in his eyes! Let him never know me other than what he believes me to be. Let me die rather than he should know the truth. He must not know! He shall not know! I would sooner have him blind—blind!..."
Ah, God! what was she saying? What was she praying for? Where was her terror driving her? It was her husband, the father of her child, upon whom she was invoking calamity. The thought of the helpless being who was not wholly hers nor wholly his, but the belonging to both, seemed to stem the torrent of her remorseful passion, and to partly calm the storm in her heart. She instinctively turned towards the chapel, and throwing herself at the foot of her bridal altar she silently sought help and guidance from the long-suffering God whose name is so often taken in vain.
"Getha found her senseless."
There, several hours later, Getha found her senseless, Ivo's telegram clutched in her hand. The old woman read it by the flickering light of the lamp she carried, and she thought she comprehended the situation. Her one fear was lest the long-absent husband might return too late.
When Nasha awoke to consciousness the year was two months old. She remembered everything perfectly. She asked for a calendar, and counted the days since the fatal news had been brought her. Probably in the interval he had come, seen her, and gone, but she dared ask no questions. She lay mute and white for awhile, feeling more than thinking; then she bent over the baby face sleeping beside her, and carefully scrutinized its tender lineaments. Thank God! Some, at least, of her strenuous prayers had been answered: her infant did not resemble her.
Love, the mysterious artificer, working unseen, had moulded the little creature in the image of its father; the bud contained the promise of as rich a beauty; it would
