Sacrifice!  I said to myself, how far does it excel passion!  What pleasure has roots so deep as one which is not personal but creative?  Is not the spirit of Sacrifice a power mightier than any of its results?  Is it not that mysterious, tireless divinity, who hides beneath innumerable spheres in an unexplored centre, through which all worlds in turn must pass?  Sacrifice, solitary and secret, rich in pleasures only tasted in silence, which none can guess at, and no profane eye has ever seen; Sacrifice, jealous God and tyrant, God of strength and victory, exhaustless spring which, partaking of the very essence of all that exists, can by no expenditure be drained below its own level;—­Sacrifice, there is the keynote of my life.

For you, Louise, love is but the reflex of Felipe’s passion; the life which I shed upon my little ones will come back to me in ever-growing fulness.  The plenty of your golden harvest will pass; mine, though late, will be but the more enduring, for each hour will see it renewed.  Love may be the fairest gem which Society has filched from Nature; but what is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood?  A smile has dried my tears.  Love makes my Louis happy, but marriage has made me a mother, and who shall say I am not happy also?

With slow steps, then, I returned to my white grange, with the green shutters, to write you these thoughts.

So it is, darling, that the most marvelous, and yet the simplest, process of nature has been going on in me for five months; and yet—­in your ear let me whisper it—­so far it agitates neither my heart nor my understanding.  I see all around me happy; the grandfather-to-be has become a child again, trespassing on the grandchild’s place; the father wears a grave and anxious look; they are all most attentive to me, all talk of the joy of being a mother.  Alas!  I alone remain cold, and I dare not tell you how dead I am to all emotion, though I affect a little in order not to damp the general satisfaction.  But with you I may be frank; and I confess that, at my present stage, motherhood is a mere affair of the imagination.

Louis was to the full as much surprised as I. Does not this show how little, unless by his impatient wishes, the father counts for in this matter?  Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.  My doctor, while maintaining that this chance works in harmony with nature, does not deny that children who are the fruit of passionate love are bound to be richly endowed both physically and mentally, and that often the happiness which shone like a radiant star over their birth seems to watch over them through life.  It may be then, Louise, that motherhood reserves joys for you which I shall never know.  It may be that the feeling of a mother for the child of a man whom she adores, as you adore Felipe, is different from that with which she regards the offspring of reason, duty, and desperation!