wonder and the doubt of how far the real father would be the one to whom, with her desire of heaven for her child, whatever might become of herself, she would wish to intrust him.  Slight speeches, telling of a selfish, worldly nature, unnoticed at the time, came back upon her ear, having a new significance.  They told of a low standard, of impatient self-indulgence, of no acknowledgment of things spiritual and heavenly.  Even while this examination was forced upon her, by the new spirit of maternity that had entered into her and made her child’s welfare supreme, she hated and reproached herself for the necessity there seemed upon her of examining and judging the absent father of her child.  And so the compelling presence that had taken possession of her wearied her into a kind of feverish slumber; in which she dreamt that the innocent babe that lay by her side in soft ruddy slumber, had started up into man’s growth, and, instead of the pure and noble being whom she had prayed to present as her child to “Our Father in heaven,” he was a repetition of his father; and, like him, lured some maiden (who in her dream seemed strangely like herself, only more utterly sad and desolate even than she) into sin, and left her there to even a worse fate than that of suicide.  For Ruth believed there was a worse.  She dreamt she saw the girl, wandering, lost; and that she saw her son in high places, prosperous—­but with more than blood on his soul.  She saw her son dragged down by the clinging girl into some pit of horrors into which she dared not look, but from whence his father’s voice was heard, crying aloud, that in his day and generation he had not remembered the words of God, and that now he was “tormented in this flame.”  Then she started in sick terror, and saw, by the dim rushlight, Sally, nodding in an armchair by the fire; and felt her little soft warm babe, nestled up against her breast, rocked by her heart, which yet beat hard from the effects of the evil dream.  She dared not go to sleep again, but prayed.  And, every time she prayed, she asked with a more complete wisdom, and a more utter and self-forgetting faith.  Little child! thy angel was with God, and drew her nearer and nearer to Him, whose face is continually beheld by the angels of little children.

CHAPTER XVI

SALLY TELLS OF HER SWEETHEARTS, AND DISCOURSES ON THE DUTIES OF LIFE

Sally and Miss Benson took it in turns to sit up, or rather, they took it in turns to nod by the fire; for if Ruth was awake she lay very still in the moonlight calm of her sick bed.  That time resembled a beautiful August evening, such as I have seen.  The white, snowy rolling mist covers up under its great sheet all trees and meadows, and tokens of earth; but it cannot rise high enough to shut out the heavens, which on such nights seem bending very near, and to be the only real and present objects; and so near, so real and present, did heaven, and eternity, and God seem to Ruth, as she lay encircling her mysterious holy child.