" She hoped and believed that no one
would know the sin of his parents; and that that struggle might
be spared to him. 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. Slight speeches, telling of a selfish,
worldly nature, unnoticed at the time, came back upon her ear,
having a new significance. They told of a low standard, of
impatient self-indulgence, of no acknowledgment of things
spiritual and heavenly. 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. 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.
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