inevitable course of events. Denis would marry some one else--he was one of
the men who are fated to marry, and she needed not his mother's reminder
that her abandonment of him at an emotional crisis would fling him upon the
first sympathy within reach. He would marry a girl who knew nothing of his
secret--for Kate was intensely aware that he would never again willingly
confess himself--he would marry a girl who trusted him and leaned on him,
as she, Kate Orme--the earlier Kate Orme--had done but two days since! And
with this deception between them their child would be born: born to an
inheritance of secret weakness, a vice of the moral fibre, as it might be
born with some hidden physical taint which would destroy it before the
cause should be detected.... Well, and what of it? Was she to hold herself
responsible? Were not thousands of children born with some such unsuspected
taint?... Ah, but if here was one that she could save? What if she, who had
had so exquisite a vision of wifehood, should reconstruct from its ruins
this vision of protecting maternity--if her love for her lover should be,
not lost, but transformed, enlarged, into this passion of charity for his
race? If she might expiate and redeem his fault by becoming a refuge from
its consequences? Before this strange extension of her love all the old
limitations seemed to fall. Something had cleft the surface of self, and
there welled up the mysterious primal influences, the sacrificial instinct
of her sex, a passion of spiritual motherhood that made her long to fling
herself between the unborn child and its fate....

She never knew, then or after, how she reached this mystic climax of
effacement; she was only conscious, through her anguish, of that lift of
the heart which made one of the saints declare that joy was the inmost core
of sorrow. For it was indeed a kind of joy she felt, if old names must
serve for such new meanings; a surge of liberating faith in life, the old
_credo quia absurdum_ which is the secret cry of all supreme
endeavour.