Often during the trouble and discouragement of years it had seemed to her that her own life and every other life would have had more meaning if only there had been, away off somewhere in the universe, a higher evil intelligence to look on and laugh, to laugh pitilessly at every human thing.  She had held on to her faith because she must hold on to something, and she had nothing else.  Now as she stood there, following the winding night road over the rock, her thoughts went back and searched once more along the wandering pathway of her years; and she said that a Power greater than any earthly had led her with her son to the hidden goal of them both, the cathedral.

The next day brought no disappointment:  he had rushed home and thrown himself into her arms and told her that he was accepted.  He was to sing in the choir.  The hope had become an actuality.

Later that day the choir-master himself had called again to speak to her when the pupil was not present.  He was guarded in his words but could not conceal the enthusiasm of his mood.

“I do not know what it may develop into,” he said,—­“that is something we cannot foretell,—­but I believe it will be a great voice in the world.  I do know that it will be a wonderful voice for the choir.”

She stood before him mute with emotion.  She was as dry sand drinking a shower.

“You have made no mistake,” she said.  “It is a great voice and he will have a great career.”

The choir-master was impatient to have the lessons begin.  She asked for a few days to get him in readiness.  She reflected that he could not make his first appearance at the choir school in white linen knickerbockers.  These were the only suitable clothes he had.

This school would be his first, for she had taught him at home, haunted by a sense of responsibility that he must be specially guarded.  Now just as the unsafe years came on for him, he would be safe in that fold.  When natural changes followed as follow they must and his voice broke later on, and then came again or never came again, whatever afterward befell, behind would be the memories of his childhood.  And when he had grown to full manhood, when he was an old man and she no longer with him, wherever on the earth he might work or might wander, always he would be going back to those years in the cathedral:  they would be his safeguard, his consecration to the end.

* * * * *

Now a few days later she stood in the same favorite spot, at her windows; and it was her favorite hour to be there, the coming on of twilight.

All day until nearly sundown a cold April rain had fallen.  These contradictory spring days of young green and winter cold the pious folk of older lands and ages named the days of the ice saints.  They really fall in May, but this had been like one of them.  So raw and chill had been the atmosphere of the grateless garret that the window-frames had been fastened down, their rusty catches clamped.