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. 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.
They told of a low standard, of impatient selfindulgence, of no acknowledgment of things spiritual and heavenly. Slight speeches, telling of a selfish, worldly nature, unnoticed at the time, came back upon her ear, having a new significance. But a father's powerful care and mighty guidance would never be his and then, in those hours of spiritual purification, came the 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. And sadness grew like a giant in the still watches of the night, when she remembered that there would be no father to guide and strengthen the child, and place him in a favourable position for fighting the hard "Battle of Life." She hoped and believed that no one would know the sin of his parents and that that struggle might be spared to him. There was the natural want of the person, who alone could take an interest similar in kind, though not in amount, to the mother's.
But soon remembrance and anticipation came.
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