“HOW soon can he come?” said Gwen, when Mrs. Fellowes returned after sending the message. “I have been counting up, it must be three weeks even if he is at the coast; if he is inland, it may be longer. Now the missionary is safe, he must be just hunting, he will be sure to get my message without much delay.” She spoke rapidly and walked about the room with her boy in her arms. “She hasn’t a doubt as to his reply to her message,” thought Mrs. Fellowes; “how absolutely she trusts him!” “Will he wonder when he sees I am here—will he guess why I came?” she went on in her glad excitement. “Darling, sweet, beauty! What will he think of you?” “Gwen, sit down, or let me take him, you are not perfectly strong yet.” “I am,” she cried, with a happy laugh, “I am a giant refreshed with wine, a whole volume of new life has flowed into me, I could move the world at this moment, not to say carry this mite. I am a woman at last, a full, complete, proper woman, and it is magnificent. No other living woman can feel as I do; other women absorb these feelings as they do their daily bread and butter, and they have to them the same placid everyday taste, they slip into their womanhood; mine has rushed into me with a great torrent—I love my husband, I worship him, I adore him—do you hear, my dear?” She stopped in her march, and turned on Mrs. Fellowes a radiant triumphant face. “Ah, if I hadn’t you to tell all this to, I would go out into the fields and shout it aloud. And what are _you_ crying for, I am not mad? I am, I suppose, what Humphrey would call natural, but somehow it makes me feel too big for the room. Hold the child while I open the windows.” Mrs. Fellowes, as soon as she got hold of him, carried him off to the nursery, and simply insisted on Gwen’s lying down and holding her tongue. “Do you want to bring a fever on yourself,” she demanded sternly, “and be a scarecrow when Humphrey comes? You are shockingly young, my Gwen!” She was sane after that, and tried to behave as if nothing had happened to her, but the change in her was quite visible to the naked eye. Next day she buckled to her steward’s work with a whole-hearted dominance, that ensured success, and Mrs. Fellowes went home to her husband big with happy news. * * * * * When five weeks had passed, and she had neither message or sight of Humphrey, Gwen’s magnificent abandonment of joy had a break, and a trembling came into it, and into her eyes a wave of fear, and every time she came in from her work in the village or on the home farm, she betook herself to the baby to steady her nerves.