she too, I doubt not, learnt something from my soul, which was eager and inventive enough, but restless and fugitive of purpose.  And then there came a further joy to us.  That which is fatherly and motherly in the world below is not a thing that is lost in heaven; and just as the love of man and woman can draw down and imprison a soul in a body of flesh, so in heaven the dear intention of one soul to another brings about a yearning, which grows day by day in intensity, for some further outlet of love and care.

It was one quiet misty morning that, as we sat together in tranquil talk, we heard faltering steps within our garden.  We had seen, let me say, very little of the other inhabitants of our valley.  We had sometimes seen a pair of figures wandering at a distance, and we had even met neighbours and exchanged a greeting.  But the valley had no social life of its own, and no one ever seemed, so far as we knew, to enter any other dwelling, though they met in quiet friendliness.  Cynthia went to the door and opened it; then she darted out, and, just when I was about to follow, she returned, leading by the hand a tiny child, who looked at us with an air of perfect contentment and simplicity.

“Where on earth has this enchanting baby sprung from?” said Cynthia, seating the child upon her lap, and beginning to talk to it in a strangely unintelligible language, which the child appeared to understand perfectly.

I laughed.  “Out of our two hearts, perhaps,” I said.  At which Cynthia blushed, and said that I did not understand or care for children.  She added that men’s only idea about children was to think how much they could teach them.

“Yes,” I said, “we will begin lessons to-morrow, and go on to the Latin Grammar very shortly.”

At which Cynthia folded the child in her arms, to defend it, and reassured it in a sentence which is far too silly to set down here.

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  The husband is apt to find his wife’s love almost withdrawn from him, and to see her nourishing all kinds of jealousies and vague ambitions for her child.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