and for the first time in many months a smile hovered upon his lips.

What an exquisite image of the Creator was this child! and he might call
it his own, and if, as he intended, it grew up an innocent, happy lad, it
would also become a genuine man, with a warm heart and simple, upright
nature, not a moving marble figure, inflated by pompous self-conceit,
incapable of any deep feeling, any untrammelled emotion, like his son
Philip. Then it might happen that from love, from a real living impulse
of the heart, he would fall upon his neck; then----

He stretched both hands towards the little bed and, obeying a mighty
impulse of paternal affection, bent toward the boy to kiss him. But ere
his lips touched the child's he again gazed around him like a thief who
is afraid of being caught. At last he yielded to the longing which urged
him, and kissed little John--his, yes, his own son--first on his high,
open brow, and then on his red lips.

How sweet it was! Yet while he confessed this a painful emotion blended
with the pleasure.

He had again thought of Barbara, of her first kiss and the other joys of
the fairest May-time of his life, and the anxious fear stole upon him
that he might give sin a power over his soul which, after undergoing a
heavy penance, he thought he had broken.

Nothing, nothing at all, he now said to himself, ought to bind him
to the woman whom he had effaced from the book of his life as unworthy,
rebellious, lost to salvation; and, in a totally different mood, he again
gazed at the child. It already wore the semblance of an angel in the
gracious Virgin's train, and it should be dedicated to her and her divine