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Over here life had not been easy; but she had given no sign. It had been beyond her strength; but she had never faltered. She was making home and happiness and she had found a vivid joy in it. She had been lonesome in the long days of necessary solitude; but no one knew it. She had been home-sick for old sights, old faces, old luxuries; but there was always a smile on her lip when any one looked. Sometimes her husband took her with him on his errands to the distant town, and as she saw the busy people going to and fro a great love swept from her to one and all of them. And when her child was coming, she was so glad of him that that love for others seemed only to have opened the way for an inexhaustible fountain of love flowing to him and through him. She had a sort of smiling memory that it took generations to make a gentleman — it had meant generations of mothers, of course; and after all was a gentleman in the first place other than a man of the people who loved his people? Fate must have begun in season with her child. She searched herself, if by mischance any hidden sin in her could come to light in him; she had prayed almost hourly that he might have truth, courage, a pure heart, a generous hand, a selfless spirit, and that, when the ordeal came, if one must go, the child should stay and have his share of the joy of the world that she had found so sweet, unwitting that her very prayer gave him all the loftiness she craved for him.

And now the son had been born to her and slept beside her, a strong and lusty boy, the builder, possibly, of a new race; surely, as she had dreamed, the last richness of an old one. She lay with indistinct, half-wandering fancies, looking into the pouring moonlight. For a moment she was quite sure she saw them — the two great angels; and then the eyelids dropped dreamily, and she saw no more.

"It is a child," said the shadowy angel, hovering over the bed, "whose mother had given him the strength that becomes a man, who has a place to take in the world, a work to do, and a will to do it. The race needs him. He is yours. "

"It is a mother," said the shining angel, "who has already given her child the welcome that makes a joyous soul. He shall not miss her smile. He is what she is. He will need love since he will give so much. And she is all compact of love. She is one of the forces of Life. Death, I cannot surrender her. "

And the dark angel fled away into the moonlight, and the shining one fanned sleeping mother and child with his wings.