“Perhaps now,” the poor man thought, “perhaps now she will find what she wants, and can rest and be satisfied, and our life will return to us. This maternal feeling must certainly be a very powerful and a very precious factor in a woman’s making, or such an one as my wife would not be so touched and shaken by its advent and growth in her. It is a mystery, in truth, thus to come so late, born out of due season as it were, and so strongly to take possession of her. I certainly never should have classed her among the true mothers, the producing women; they should be of a more robust, a more animal type altogether. It is a most remarkable case, with curious complications. It is the daughter—the feminine part of her—my wife yearns and pants for, the masculine element seems to affect her but little; when our son Dacre visits us I have in vain looked for any symptoms of satisfaction or restfulness. “I feel so unusually depressed and aged, this afternoon,” he went on, slowly, laying down his fruitless pen, and gazing with sad eyes out of the window, “even my ordinary lucidity of brain seems clouding and thickening. It cannot be that I have already reached the ultimatum, and that the period of decadence is now upon me—that cannot surely be! Only just forty-seven,” he cried softly, and his face sank down in his hands on the study table. He raised it again, and went over to his cabinet and touched his heaps of manuscript one by one with loving lingering tenderness, but a little shakily. “This but just begun!” he murmured; “this but just wanting the verification of an experiment or two; these, notes for a new work, the most comprehensive, the most exact we have yet made—ah! this book would have been very close up to the truth, nearer to it than anything yet produced.—She looked with such keen, such very youthful pleasure to the lighter task of compilation; that youthfulness in her intellectual pleasures is a very precious gift of my wife. “Here is a little satirical skit she wrote in a playful moment, how charming it is, how delicate! Ah, my sweet young wife! More notes—more—and so few worked out to their final conclusion! Must I then take these symptoms as those of untimely decay,” he whispered sitting down again, “I, who looked to long years of honest labour in which I might have forged on farther than my fellows, and have erected some fresh finger-posts on the road to everlasting truth? To stop now, when the world is crying and wailing in the darkness of its ignorance, when men grasp any scrap of verified knowledge as a drowning man a straw, and must I be swept down the hill before I have breasted the crest? Must I sink to oblivion with my work but just begun, and with the heat of battle strong upon me—and she—my wife, my own, my helpmeet——Do none of these things strike and touch her, does this overmastering strange tumult of new emotions shut her heart to the awful beauty of truth?