world of motherhood. Through all the wrongs which she may suffer by him,
there runs this cable of unhappy attraction, testified to by how many
sorrowful lives!

But Lali was trying to think it out, not only to feel, and she did not
count that subterranean force which must play its part in this new
situation in her drama of life. Could she love him? She crept away out
of the haven where her child was, put on her dressing-gown, went to the
window, and looked out upon the night, all unconscious that her husband
was looking at her from the Square below. Love him?--Love him?--Love
him? Could she? Did he love her? Her eyes wandered over the Square.
Nowhere else was there a light, but a chimney-flue was creaking
somewhere. It jarred on her so that she shrank. Then all at once she
smiled to think how she had changed. Four years ago she could have slept
amid the hammers of a foundry. The noise ceased. Her eyes passed from
the cloud of trees in the Square to the sky-all stars, and restful deep
blue. That--that was the same. How she knew it! Orion and Ashtaroth,
and Mars and the Pleiades, and the long trail of the Milky Way. As a
little child hanging in the trees, or sprawled beside a tepee, she had
made friends with them all, even as she learned and loved all the signs
of the earth beneath--the twist of a blade of grass, the portent in the
cry of a river-hen, the colour of a star, the smell of a wind. She had
known Nature then, now she knew men. And knowing them, and having
suffered, and sick at heart as she was, standing by this window in the
dead of night, the cry that shook her softly was not of her new life,
but of the old, primitive, child-like.

'Pasagathe, omarki kethose kolokani vorgantha pestorondikat Oni.'

"A spear hath pierced me, and the smart of the nettle is in my wound.