* * * * *

The woman was psychically torn.  The agony of her face cannot be pictured, nor her martyrdom of sustaining courage.  She could not see the third Presence, but it was there for her.  It was above her, yet was called by her natural greatness.  There was a line of luminous white under her eyes, that left the lower part of her face in shadow.  The eyes were shining with that dissolving supernatural light, that comes with terrible spiritual hunger.  Her dark hair had fallen in disarray.

In the first transcendent happiness she had conceived a child.  The hideous disillusionment was now—­months before the babe.  And her struggle at this moment of her heart’s death—­was to keep the madness of sorrow from despoiling the child, that lay formative within—­to preserve the child whole, and in her original greatness of ideal, in the midst of her own destroying, and against the defiling commonness that had just been revealed in the father....

She had crossed the last embankment of agony; her struggle was finished.  She had conquered.  The Presence had come to hold her mind true, in this passage through chaos....  Her own death she would have welcomed, save that the babe must live.  It had come to her as a daybreak from heaven.  It must not be crushed and weighted with this tragedy of pure earth....  She held the blight from the child!

She knew this.  She arose and smiled.  Into her soul had come a sense of the amplitude of time—­a promise of adoration—­a blessing upon her courage—­a knowledge of her child’s lustre.  The Angel had whispered it.  Blithe, lifting, loving, the message had come to her from the Presence.

The man perceived that he had hurt her mortally; that his meaning to her had vanished.  He arose to approach her, but a gesture of her hand made him sink again into the low chair.  He seemed trying to realize that she had passed beyond him, indeed,—­trying to realize what it would mean to him....  Pitiful, boyish and unfinished, he struggled to adjust his own life to her going—­and watched her bind her hair.

Every movement of the conflict held a globe of meaning for the son of this woman, a third of a century afterward.  Her tragedy had marked it imperishably upon the tissue of his life, with Beethoven’s Andante movement for the key.  Strains of it may have come to that music-room with these towering emotions....  More than this Andrew Bedient saw the sources of his own heritage!  From another aspect he viewed the deathlessness of time, the beauty of physical death, the radiance of the future, the immortality of love.  It was revealed how all the agony of the world arises from the knitting together of soul and flesh, the evolving of soul through flesh.  Spirit is given birth in flesh—­and birth is pain.  Death is the ecstasy of the grown spirit.  Spirit prospers alone through giving, and greatly through the giving of love.  Spirit shines star-like in