Page:While Caroline Was Growing.djvu/299

 arm wrapped around his wealth, at once protecting and defiant; his head flung back against the world, while his eyes studied humbly the mystery that he grasped. The night lamp behind them threw a halo around the mother and her child, and the great trinity of all times and all faiths gleamed immortal upon the canvas of the simple room—its only spectator a child.

In her, malleable to all the influences of the revealing night, fairly disembodied, in her detached and flitting presence, the scene woke dim, coiled memories of an infancy that stirred and pained her even as it left her forever, and frightened longing for the motherhood that life was holding for her. No longer an infant, not yet a woman, this creature that was both felt the helplessness of one, the yearning of the other, and as she pressed the nestling cat tightly to her little breast two great, eager tears slipped down her hot cheeks, and a gulping sob, half loneliness, half pure excitement, broke into the gentle stillness of the lighted room.

"Who's there?"

The man's voice rang like a sudden pistol shot