And the wise old woman was even wiser than she knew. At that very moment, Douglass, looking at a picture that should have logically thrilled him to the core, was travailing in a morose discontent quite incompatible with his environment. The woman for whose sake he had imperiled all that a man holds dear, was sitting opposite him on the hotel veranda In the soft moonlight, with little Eulalie cuddled closely to her. Every full, round line of her betokened her perfect fitness for maternity and the motherhood implanted in every woman's heart was softly irradiating her face as she bent caressingly over the sleeping child. Intended by Nature as a mother of soldiers, here by the caprice of fate she was fostering the weak offspring of another less fit, denied woman's highest mission, debarred from Nature's most noble function. And he had but to say the word!
For that afternoon, in an agony of passion, she had whispered a temptation in his ear, clinging to him with all the seductiveness in her nature:
"Let us go away, dear, anywhere, anywhere, so that we are together! There will be a separation without any publicity, for he is very proud; and he really never cared! Make me the wife and mother that Nature intended me to be; give me the fulfillment that is every woman's due!"
It came to him with a shock, for he had been living only in the enjoyment of the present. Brought face to face with the eternal future, he realized a great unpreparedness, abnormal as it was disquieting. He had answered her evasively, with a politic tenderness that satisfied her temporarily; but he knew that her insistence was only deferred, and his answer was not ready. And to-night he was cursing the inevitable brutality that he knew he would ultimately be compelled to exercise.
For even as his soul yearned at the tender appeal of that picture most exquisite to man, the mothering of a child, the beauteous face before him was replaced by another, reproachful and haughty yet fair with a purity and beauty indescribable, the patrician mouth trembling and the sweet eyes brimming with appeal. Sharply he shut his teeth and sat erect.
Only one woman in the world should be mother to his children--and that woman was not the beauty crooning softly to that sleeping babe! He had lost her for a little while but he would find her, and the way back into her favor! And having found her, at whatever bitter cost, he would never let her go again! He resolved that on the morrow he would ride over to the C Bar and grovel in abasement at her feet if need be.