A thought struck her like an icebolt. What would Barton say, even in this auspicious hour, to the systematic concealment practiced before and since the advent of the adopted child? Would he throw it from him as he would a snake? She pictured the possibility of virtuous horror in the regards turned upon her, the aversion a moral man feels for a lost woman. Deception—even untruth might be forgiven; the deliberate disregard of his expressed wish that his wife should never again put sentiment or feeling of hers into print would be construed into absolute crime. He held the desire for literary renown on the part of a woman to be a fault that unsexed her. In a young girl the ambition might spring from the unrest of an unfilled heart, mistaken, but pardonable as a blunder of ignorance. A wife’s heart, thoughts, and hands should be _full_ of home and home loves, or she did not deserve her high and blessed estate. She felt, now, that she could never make him understand how the side of her nature which he saw and knew was bettered and elevated by the healthful action of its twin, to which he was a stranger. She _had_ “put herself into the book,” but not in the lower and vulgar sense in which the reviewers had used the phrase. The aspirations with which others could not intermeddle—least of all, the husband who so grossly misjudged her, the fancies that beguiled Time of heaviness and drew the soreness from her heart while she dallied with them—were there. Her ideals were her real companions; her dream children her only confidants. “_The things which are seen are temporal; the things which are not seen are eternal._” The author who is not made, but born; the idealist whose brain creations are to him almost visible and tangible, while he communes with them—can, of all men, enter most joyfully into the meaning of the sweet mysticism uttered by the Creator of things temporal and things eternal. It was a snowy day; transient glimmers of white light, shed from thinner clouds, were the precursors of thicker falls of soundless flakes. There was no wind, and as Agnes watched the storm between the slightly parted blinds, a curtain of purest lace seemed unfolding and wavering earthward. The hush of a great holiday enwrapped the city. Baby Nest slumbered peacefully amid billows of lawn and wool; the strong, mobile features of the husband she loved and feared more than any other living mortal darkened and lightened like the snow clouds, with the progress of the story. He read well, and threw unusual spirit into the present task. Agnes hearkened, with a growing sense of unreality. The disowned child pressed nearer and closer, gazed appealingly into her face, cooed love words in her ear, covered with kisses the hands with which the hapless mother was constrained to hold it aloof from the heart that yearned to take it in.