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218 thought much about Gerald. She was sure that if he had known her condition he would not have dealt her this blow. But he must have known in any case that it would be a blow to her; and all life took a darker colour because of his inability to bear it.

In December Teresa was very ill. She went to a hospital, and there the baby was born, and lived but two days. It was a boy; and at her first sight of him Teresa thought she saw an epitome of all the sorrows of man. He was totally unlike her first child. His tiny face, with heavy, mournful eyelids, with strange, deep lines about the mouth, made him seem a creature as old as the world. To Teresa all the sad experience of humanity seemed foreshadowed or summed up in him.

He died; and Teresa's grief was passionate beyond the comprehension perhaps of any man. Basil, though sad himself, and full of sympathy for her suffering, could not understand its full extent. To him the child had never really lived; it was hardly more than an abstract expression of the terrible will to live of the unborn universe; an atom of the ever-pulsing energy which forced its way into the world, causing suffering and woe—all for a life of two days. But to Teresa the baby was a complete being, and she sorrowed for him as though she had wronged him herself of his life. And she sorrowed for herself, for the