We have violated gentle Nature’s laws in our ways of living, and inasmuch as we have done this, we have lost, to such extent, her soft protecting hand.  We breathe too little of the pure air; we are lax in physical effort, and, even though the individual man or woman be wise, he or she must bear the burden of the errors of an ancestry or the evils of the present.  So, to the woman gentle-bred there comes a risk in the undergoing of that which she has most hoped for since she loved a man, and since she would be all there is of perfect womanhood.  There is peril, and she knows it, but is braver than man at this time.  There is peril, and he knows it, and he is helpless and clinging as a child.  What can he do?  Nothing, save to bring in a hard hour the presence of one who may not bear a portion of the real trial.  Yet this is something.  It has saved dear women’s lives.  There is something—­we do not quite understand about it yet—­which is a band of more than steel between two close together, and which holds back the one sometimes from even the grip of that force seldom denied, which is named Death, the one who fills the graveyards.

And, one evening, there was a man in deep trouble, and in the morning he sat beside a bed in which was his small wife and beside her a tiny red thing, “rather underdone,” he said, in the buoyant reaction which came upon him, for that was Harlson’s way when he had emerged from trouble; and the small red thing was the son of the two of them.  And who can tell what the man said to the woman.  There are precious, sacred overflows of love, sweet outbursts of what makes life worth the living, never yet in words for all, never yet written in black upon some white surface.  There is a sanctuary.

It was a healthy baby, and the mother was soon herself, and the most foolish of small women over it.  I rather liked the young animal myself, for they let me see it when its days were few, and it clutched at my fingers in a way that won me.  It was a curious young animal to me.  It took to the water wonderfully, and all three of us together sometimes, when I would call, would summon the nurse and see the young villain bathe.  This was when he was but a few months old.  He was such a royal fellow, so brave and buoyant, that I fell in love with him.  How could a lonely man help being foolish?

An odd name had the child.  It all came from the hours, when, all danger passed, a proud and happy man sat upon a bedside and looked down into the face of a proud and happy woman, and, at times, studied the quality of the odd mite beside her, half hidden in the waves of pillow and of sheet.  He would look at the thing’s wonderful hands, and its wonderful pink feet, and have remarks to make.  One hour he came in and examined the creature and repeated great words from some authority: