But the mother hardly listened. She had eaten with the child, slept with the child and almost breathed with the child for three days now, and the ecstasy of the experience had blinded her to any other claim than her own. She pitied Mrs. Ocumpaugh, pitied most of all her deceived husband, but no grief of theirs could equal that of Rachel crying for her child. Let Mrs. Ocumpaugh remember that when the evil days come. She had separated child from mother! child from mother! Oh, how the wail swept through those two rooms!
I dared not prophesy to myself at this point how this would end. I simply waited.
Their voices had sunk after each passionate outbreak, and I was only able to catch now and then a word which told me that the struggle was yet going on.
But finally there came a lull, and while I wondered, the door flew suddenly open and I saw Mrs. Ocumpaugh standing on the threshold, pallid and stricken, looking back at the picture made by the other two as Mrs. Carew, fallen on her knees by the bedside, held to her breast the panting child.
"I can not go against nature," said she. "Keep Gwendolen, and may God have pity upon me and Philo."
I stepped forward. Meeting my eye, she faltered this last word:
"Your advice was good. To-morrow when I meet my husband I will tell him who found the child and why that child is not at my side to greet him."
That night I had a vision. I saw a door--shut, ominous. Before that door stood a woman, tall, pale, beautiful. She was there to enter, but to what no mortal living could say. She saw nothing but loss and the hollowness of a living death behind that closed door.
But who knows? Angels spring up unknown on the darkest road, and perhaps--
Here the vision broke; the day and its possibilities lay before me.
A LIST _of_ IMPORTANT FICTION THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
Of Miss Lady, whom it involved in mystery, and of John Eddring, gentleman of the South, who read its deeper meaning
By EMERSON HOUGH, Author of The Mississippi Bubble
Romantic, unhackneyed, imaginative, touched with humor, full of spirit and dash.
So virile, so strong, so full of the rare qualities of beauty and truth.
A powerful novel, vividly presented. The action is rapid and dramatic, and the romance holds the reader with irresistible force.