“My dear fellow,” he said in answer to my stammered suggestion that marriage was simpler and less fraught with perilous possibilities, “Ann and I are not in the least hoodwinked by marriage.  It has enervated the whole race of womankind and led to their complete economic dependence upon a polygamous sex who abuse the trust.  Now Ann believes firmly in the holiness of maternity, but she flatly refuses to take upon herself the responsibility of an unwelcome tie.  In this, as in everything, I cordially endorse her views.  Ann is past the callow age.  She has refused a number of men who were conspicuously her inferiors, though Dad has stormed a bit.  Now you are the one man whom I consider her physical and mental equal, the one man to whom I may talk in this manner without fear of bigoted misunderstanding, but—­while Ann’s friendship for you is warm and wholly sincere—­she doesn’t love you.  If she did,” said my impudent young friend, “she’d likely shrug away her aversion to marital custom and marry you before you were well aware of it.  As it is, she declines to sacrifice the maternal inheritance of her sex and she refuses to marry.  And there you are!”

Looking back now after five years of readjustment and metamorphosis, I marvel at the cool philosophy with which two adventurous young scapegraces settled the question of a little lad’s unconventional birth.

I pass over now the heartbroken reproaches of Ann’s father when my son was born.  We told him the truth and he could not understand.  He looked through the eyes of the world and it widened the gulf forever.  Thereafter Norman and Ann lived in the lodge.

Ann was a wonderful mother and the boy as sturdy and handsome a little lad as the mother-heart of any woman ever worshiped.  But I!  How easy it had been to promise to make no particular advance of affection to my son—­to suggest in no way my claim upon him—­to take up the thread of my life again as if he had never been born—­to regard myself merely as the physical instrument necessary to his creation!

I was to learn with bitter suffering the truth that my act bound me irrevocably in soul and heart to my boy and his mother.

I shall not forget the night when I faced the truth.  It was in the great room of the lodge, the blazing wood fire staining the bearskin rugs.  Outside, in the early twilight, there was wind, and trees hung with snow, and the dull, frozen lap of a winter lake.  I had come up to the lodge at Norman’s invitation.  As far as he and Ann were concerned, my claim upon Ann’s boy was quite forgotten.

He had grown into a dark, ruddy, handsome little lad, this son of mine, with a brain and body far beyond his years, thanks to Ann’s marvelous gift of motherhood, her care and her teaching.

Ann sat by the old, square piano singing some marvelous mother’s lullaby of the Norseland, her full contralto ringing with splendid tenderness.  Mother and son were alone when I entered.  Carl was busily at play on a rug by the fire.