It would be a sorrow.  Mrs. Gregory was a rigid Catholic, her life’s one prayer nowadays was that her beloved son might become one, too.  Her marriage at seventeen to a non-Catholic had been undertaken in the firm conviction that faith like hers must win the conversion of her beloved James, the best, the most honorable of men.  When her oldest son was born, and given his father’s name, she saw, in her husband’s willingness to further plans for the baptism, definite cause for hope.  Another son was born, there was another christening; it was the father’s own hand that gave the third baby lay-baptism only a few moments before the tiny life slipped back into the eternity from which it had so lately come.

A year or two later a fourth son was born.  Presently the dignified Mrs. Gregory was taking a trio of small, sleek-headed boys to Sunday-school, watching every phase in the development of their awakening souls with terror and with hope.  What fears she suffered in spirit during those years no one but herself knew.  Outwardly, the hospitable, gracious life of the great house went on; the Gregorys were prominent in charities, they opened their mountain camp for the summer, they travelled abroad, they had an audience with the Pope.  Time went on, and the twelve-year-old George was taken from them, breaking the father’s heart, said the watching world.  But there was a strange calm in the mother’s eyes as they rested on the dead child’s serene face:  Heaven had her free offering, now she must have her reward.

A few months later James Gregory became a convert to her religion.  Charles, the second son, had never wavered from his mother’s faith, and rejoiced with her in this great event.  But the first-born, Warren, as all but his mother called him, to avoid confusion with his father, was a junior in college when these changes took place, and when he came home for the long vacation his mother knew what her cross must be for the years to come.  He listened to her with the appalling silence of the nineteen-year-old male, he kissed her, he returned gruff, embarrassed answers to her searching questions of his soul, and he escaped from her with visibly expanding lungs and averted eyes.  She knew that she had lost him.

Men called him a good man, and she assented with dry lips and heavy eyelids.  Charles died, leaving a young widow and an infant son, the father shortly followed, and Warren came home from his interne year, and was a good son to her in her dark hour.  When they began to say of him that he would be great, she smiled sadly.  “My father was a doctor,” she said once to an old friend, “and James inherits it!” But at a memory of her own father, erect and rosy among his girls and boys in the family pew, she burst into tears.  “I would rather have him with his father, with George and Charles, and with my angel Francis, than have him the greatest man that ever lived!” she said.

But if she had not made him a good Catholic she had made him a good man, and it was a fair and honorable record that Warren Gregory could offer to the woman he loved.  Love—­it had come to him at last.  His thoughts went back to Rachael.  It seemed to him that he had always known how deeply, how recklessly he loved her.