She turned from her responsive audience to the chairwoman, who handed her a yellow envelope.

“A telegram, Miss Barrington.  Should I have given it to you before?  I disliked interrupting.”

Kate tore it open.

It was from the President of the United States.  It ran:—­

“I have the honor to inform you that the Bureau of Children will become a feature of our government within a year.  It is the desire of those most interested, myself included, that you should accept the superintendence of it.  I hope this will reach you on the day of your address before the Federation of Women’s Clubs.  Accept my congratulations.”

It was signed by the chief executive.  Kate passed the message to the chairwoman.

“May I read it?” the gratified president questioned.  Kate nodded.  The gavel fell, and the vibrant, tremulous voice of the president was heard reading the significant message.  The women listened for a moment with something like incredulity—­for they were more used to delays and frustrations than to cooeperation; then the house filled with the curious muffled sounds of gloved hands in applause.  Presently a voice shrilled out in inarticulate acclaim.  Kate could not catch its meaning, but two thousand women, robed like flowers, swayed to their feet.  Their handkerchiefs fluttered.  The lovely Californian blossoms were snatched from their belts and their bosoms and flung upon the platform with enthusiastic, uncertain aim.

XXXII

Afterward Kate took Honora down to the sea.  They found a little house that fairly bathed its feet in the surf, and here they passed the days very quietly, at least to outward seeming.  The Pacific thundered in upon them; they could hear the winds, calling and calling with an immemorial invitation; they knew of the little jewelled islands that lay out in the seas and of the lands of eld on the far, far shore; and they dreamed strange dreams.

Sitting in the twilight, watching the light reluctantly leave the sea, they spoke of many things.  They spoke most of all of women, and it sometimes seemed, as they sat there,—­one at the doorway of the House of Life and one in a shaded inner chamber,—­as if the rune of women came to them from their far sisters:  from those in their harems, from others in the blare of commercial, Occidental life; from those in chambers of pain; from those freighted with the poignant burdens which women bear in their bodies and in their souls.

As the darkness deepened, they grew unashamed and then reticences fell from them.  The eternally flowing sea, the ever-recurrent night gave them courage, though they were women, to speak the truth.

“When I found how deeply I loved David,” said Honora, “and that I could serve him, too, by marrying him, I would no more have put the idea of marriage with him out of my mind than I would have cast away a hope of heaven if I had seen that shining before me.  I would no more have turned from it than I would have turned from food, if I had been starving; or water after I had been thirsting in the desert.  Why, Kate, to marry him was inevitable!  The bird doesn’t think when it sings or the bud when it flowers.  It does what it was created to do.  I married David the same way.”