Yet could a mother leave her child behind her? Impossible! The full tide of motherhood came over her, and its tender selfishness swept down everything. “I cannot,” she thought; “come what may, I cannot and I will not leave her.” And then she reached her hand for the child's pelisse. “It would be a kind of atonement, though,” she thought. To leave the little one to Pete would be making amends in some sort for the wrong that she was doing him. To deny herself the sight of the child's sweet face day by day and hour by hour--that would be a punishment also, and she deserved to be punished. “Can I leave her?” she thought. “Can I? Oh, what mother could bear it? No, no--never, never! And yet I ought--I must--Oh, this is terrible!” In the midst of this agony of uncertainty, thinking of Pete and of the wrong she had done him, yet pressing the child to her breast with trembling arms, as if some one were tearing it away, the babe itself settled everything. Making some inarticulate whimper of communication, it nuzzled up to her, its eyes closed, but its head working against her bosom with the instinct of suckling, though it had never sucked. “I'm only half a mother, after all,” she thought. The highest joys, the deepest rights of motherhood had been denied to her--the child taking from the mother, the mother giving to the child, the child and the mother one--: this had not been hers. “My little baby can live without me,” she thought. “If I leave her, she will never miss me.” She nearly broke down at that thought, and almost let her purpose slip. It was like God's punishment in advance, God's hand directing her--thus to withdraw the child from dependence on herself. “Yes, I must leave her with Pete,” she thought. She put the child back into the cradle, half dressed as it was, and rocked it until it slept again. Then she hung over the tiny bed as a mother hangs over the little coffin that is soon to be shut up from her eyes for ever. Her tears rained down on the small counterpane. “My sweet baby I my little Katherine! I may never kiss you again--never see you any more'--you may grow up to be a woman and know nothing of your mother!” The clock ticked loud in the quiet room--it was twenty-five minutes past seven. “One kiss more, my little darling. If they ever tell you... they'll say because your mother left you... Oh, will she think I did not love her? Hush!” Through the walls of the house there came the sound of a band playing at a distance. She looked at the clock again--it was nearly half-past seven. Almost at the same moment there was the rumble of carriage-wheels on the road. They stopped in the lane that ran between the chapel and the end of the garden.