I longed to draw her to me, to enfold her, to rest her head against my heart, to hold her close and to exclude thereby all black care and worry, all overhanging shadows, all the threatening and looming clouds of existence—to make my world blissfully complete. But I am only "Uncle Ranny" to her—and I felt a shudder pass down my spine. "And you, Alicia," I managed to say. "What did you answer?" "Of course, I said that was true—what could I say? But oh, Uncle Ranny," she leaned toward me as she stood at my desk, "I am afraid, Uncle Ranny! They are ours—aren’t they—I know he’s their father, but I can’t help feeling as though we were—handing them over to a stranger—Oh, I suppose I ought not say it—some one we don’t know at all!" And she burst into tears. Blood and flesh could not bear it longer. I twitched and writhed in my chair for an instant, then I leaped up and threw my arms about her and strained her to me. "My darling," I murmured brokenly, "and how do you suppose I feel?" "I know," she sobbed and gently, very much as Jimmie or Laura might have done, she put her arms about me and nestled as though I were some one old and fragile for whom she had a deep affection—but that was all. Alicia’s first embrace! And then I knew also. She did not, I trust, for an instant suspect the bitterness of the cup I was that moment draining. But why should I expect anything else? The guilt in my own heart tells me enough,—and too much—of exactly where I stand. Alicia is still a child. As yet evidently she did not even suspect that Pendleton was bent upon taking her also. Suppose I prevented that, then what of the other three whom, in another way, I love no less? My head was throbbing dizzily, my pulses were beating like drums. For me this was the supreme moment of anguish and sacrifice, the dark night of the soul, that _noche oscura_ that St. John of the Cross knows so well how to describe, that shakes one’s being and changes one’s life forever more. My lot seemed to be to sacrifice and break myself in final and complete renunciation, to drain my cup of bitterness to its uttermost dregs. For a moment the world was as a shadow, swaying, airy and insubstantial. The cowled monk that is buried somewhere within me was suddenly uppermost and the life of the world seemed sordid and leprous; a deadly thing rotted with lusts and passions, a thing to run away from—that was pulling me into its sensual center. But only for a moment. Then suddenly the blood surged to my temples, as Alicia lay in my arms, and the ancient cunning of a thousand male ancestors, of savage hunters and crafty warriors who died that I might live, swept into my thews and nerves and brain and I crackled with eagerness to fight for my own. No!—I would not—could not give up all that I held dear. I would fight! I gripped Alicia’s shoulders in a spasm of fierce joy and in a hoarse guttural voice that surprised her no more than it surprised me, I breathed out: