Then, with close-clasping arm holding her child to her bosom, as though in her exceeding weakness--a weakness nigh unto death, now that it seemed to float up to her from within, rather than descend upon her from above--she feared her white blossom of love might be taken from her, Sorcha sank suddenly into drowning sleep. Sitting by the bedside, with his hand stroking or holding hers, Alan revolved other thoughts than those of love only. Passing strange, passing strange, this mystery of motherhood over which he brooded obscurely. And, truly, who can know the long, bitter travail of the spirit, as well as the pangs of the body, which many women endure--except just such a woman, suffering in just that way? Can any man know? Hardly can it be so. For though a man can understand the agony of birthtide, and even the long ache and strain of the double life, can he comprehend the baffled sense of overmastering weakness, the vague informulate cry against all powers that be--Man, overlord of the womb: God, overlord of men. How many women have prayed not to Him, but to the one Pontiff before whom all thoughts bow down, worshipping in dread: to that shadowy Lord of the veiled face whom some call Death, that Woman of the compassionate eyes whom others call Oblivion, because of the poppied draught she gives the weary to drink, and the quiet glooms of rest that she holds in the hollow of her hand, and the hushed breath of her that is Forgetfulness. Thoughts such as these, though in crude words and simple symbols, were in Alan's mind. No, he knew: never again could he even listen to men jeering at birth. He, though he had come to her virginal-pure, yet feared Sorcha's eyes at times, because--though not knowing for what it was--of the deep-buried spiritual anathema which, in the gaze of the purest and noblest of women, affronts the chained brute that is in the man. Ah, do men know, do men know--many a woman cries in her heart--do men know that a woman with child dies daily: that she wakes up to die, and that she lies down to die: and that even as hourly she dies, so hourly does the child inherit life? Do they know that her body is the temple of a new soul? What men are they, in any land, who profane the sacred altars? Death was of old the just penalty of those who defiled the holy place where godhood stood revealed in stone or wood or living Bread: shall they go free who defile the temple of the human soul? "Sure, sure," Alan breathed rather than whispered, with some such thought as this in his mind, "sure I am the priest of God, and she there my temple ... and lo, my God!" ... and with that he leaned over and kissed the little rosy fingers, and the hot tears in his eyes fell upon Sorcha's breast, so that she stirred in her sleep and smiled, dreaming that a soft rain was falling upon her out of the Healing Fountain of Tears that is in the midmost Heaven. * * * * *