she saw Him place His hands on the heads of the little children at cottage doors; she imagined Him standing upon one of the stranded luggers in Newlyn harbor with the gulls floating round His head and the fishermen listening to his utterance. The growing mother instincts in Joan also developed about this season. They leaped from comparative quiescence into activity; they may indeed be recorded as having arisen within her after a manner not less sudden than had the new faith itself, which was exhibited to you as blossoming with an abruptness almost violent, because it thus occurred. Now most channels of thought led Joan to her unborn infant, and there came at length an occasion upon which she prayed for the first time that her child might be justified in its existence. The petition was raised where, in the past, she had uttered one widely different: at the altar-stone in the ruined baptistery of Saint Madron. Thither on a day in early August, Joan traveled by short cuts over fields which brought the chapel within reach of Drift. The scene had changed from that of her former visit, and summer was keeping the promises of spring. Yellow stars of biting stone-crop covered the walls of the ruin; the fruit of the blackthorn was growing purple, of the hawthorn, red; the lesser dodder crept, like pink lacework, over furze and heather; bright-eyed euphrasy and sweet wild thyme were murmured over by many bees; at the altar's foot grew brake fern and towering foxgloves; while upon the sacred stone itself brambles laid their fruit, a few ripe blackberries shining from clusters of red and green. Seeding grasses and docks likewise nourished within the little chapel, and ragged robins and dandelions brought the best beauty they had. Among which matters, hid in loneliness, to the sound of that hymn of life which rises in a whisper from all earth at summer noon, Joan prayed for her baby that it might not be born in vain. CHAPTER TWO HOME