I think that sometimes on earth the arrival of a first child is a very trying time for a wedded pair. The husband is apt to find his wife's love almost withdrawn from him, and to see her nourishing all kinds of jealousies and vague ambitions for her child. Paternity is apt to be a very bewildered and often rather dramatic emotion. But it was not so with us. The child seemed the very thing we had been needing without knowing it. It was a constant source of interest and delight; and in spite of Cynthia's attempts to keep it ignorant and even fatuous, it did develop a very charming intelligence, or rather, as I soon saw, began to perceive what it already knew. It soon overwhelmed us with questions, and used to patter about the garden with me, airing all sorts of delicious and absurd fancies. But, for all that, it did seem to make an end of the first utter closeness of our love. Cynthia after this seldom went far afield, and I ranged the hills and woods alone; but it was all absurdly and continuously happy, though I began to wonder how long it could last, and whether my faculties and energies, such as they were, could continue thus unused. And I had, too, in my mind that other scene which I had beheld, of how the boy was withdrawn from the two old people in the other valley. Was it always thus, I wondered? Was it so, that souls were drawn upwards in ceaseless pilgrimage, loving and passing on, and leaving in the hearts of those who stayed behind a longing unassuaged, which was presently to draw them onwards from the peace which they loved perhaps too well? XXX The serene life came all to an end very suddenly, and with no warning. One day I had been sitting with Cynthia, and the child was playing on the floor with some little things--stones, bits of sticks, nuts--which it had collected. It was a mysterious game too, accompanied with much impressive talk and gesticulations, much emphatic lecturing of recalcitrant pebbles, with interludes of unaccountable laughter. We had been watching the child, when Cynthia leaned across to me and said: "There is something in your mind, dear, which I cannot quite see into. It has been there for a long time, and I have not liked to ask you about it. Won't you tell me what it is?" "Yes, of course," I said; "I will tell you anything I can." "It has nothing to do with me," said Cynthia, "nor with the child; it is about yourself, I think; and it is not altogether a happy thought."