In April Anne was summoned home. Her mother had died suddenly. Her father wept for her as the young girl he had loved, and Anne, looking at the pale oval face between the sleek, dark wings of her hair, saw her for the first time as a woman of passion and force caught in too narrow an orbit.

The father went to live with John and his wife, and in June Anne was married. She remembered only one thing her father had said.

“I thought it might be, now, Annie, you would make an artist.”

She had smiled and gone swiftly on with her preparations. Her mother’s death had foreshortened life for her, until she felt at times a fear that she too might die with her desire unreached.

One of the next years there were two moments with sharp outlines; the rest blurred into full tide of passionate tenderness, fear, absorption. One moment was at night in that first summer. She and Robert walked along the river just outside the little college town, silent, until Robert turned on her.

“Where are you! I can’t reach you,” he had cried out. “I am afraid of you! You drown me, and I never touch you. What are you doing with me?”

She was glad of the darkness which hid the sudden fierce contraction of her body, hid the terror and hatred that leaped within her. But she had laughed softly and said, “You are tired. You work too hard,” until he lay with his head against her breast, her fingers in his hair, while she stared with sombre, heavy eyes at the pale glow on the water at her feet. She had been shamed at the coil of emotion his cry had struck, so that she had thrust the moment out of memory.

The other sharp moment was shortly before the birth of her second child. She lay on the couch in the sitting room, staring dully at the dingy carpet, the litter of papers on the desk. Margaret, who slept in her arms, had stirred, and the touch of that silky head in the curve under Anne’s chin drew her up from her apathy. Robert came to the door, and she knew the conflict she had waited for was upon her.

“I understand you have talked with Samuels,” Robert began. “You might have said so—all this time!”

“I thought you would wish to make your decision yourself.”

Robert slumped into a chair near the desk. She thought for the first time that she knew how he would look as an old man, the eagerness drained out of his dark face.

“Samuels told you his offer, of course? I harness my brains to his chemical plant for life.”

“He said there would be opportunity for you to carry on any experiments you wished.” Her voice trailed off wearily, as though she had no spirit for a fight.

“You’d like me to take it?”

“Only if you wish.” She pressed that small, silky head against her throat.

“You know what I want! To go on my own path—” He stopped.

“Have you thought of the children?”

“You give me small chance to think of anything else!”

She turned her face away from him, her eyes closed. Presently he rose heavily.

“Very well. Have it your way.”

“No, Robert. You must decide. Are you so sure your own path leads anywhere?” She saw in his eyes the great weight of her own passive, inert body, of her gray immobility.

“I was, once. Anne, I don’t mean to be selfish—” He flung out his hands, with their slender, nervous fingers, in a limp, impotent gesture. “Samuels’ offer is profitable. I am taking it.”

“Why so tragic, Robert?” Her words hurried slightly. “Even if you leave your university for someone who appreciates your value, you’ll still have time for your own work, evenings and all.”

“Turn off an idea after dinner!” He broke off into an ugly little laugh. “Have you no comprehension of the way creative work must be done? How you wait and wait while it grows within you? You can’t just do it forcibly overnight. But I said I was taking Samuels’ offer. I’ll become his well-paid consulting chemist.”

When he had gone, Anne laid her lips gently against the fragrant warm crease of Margaret’s neck, her eyes closed to hide their triumph.

* * * * *

After that, ten years in which Anne had been as God walking in his garden. Her children were the miracle, herself extended beyond her own narrow limits, the work of her flesh and her spirit. In them she was fulfilled, and in their growth she saw her own work. Her passion was not that of the mother so much as that of the artist. She could have created pictures; instead she chose to create human beings. Robert begged her to spend less time with the children, to leave them, and she brushed his words carelessly aside.

Almost overnight, it seemed, Jamie, the youngest, was four, sandy-haired, chunky, jolly, and Margaret, fourteen, was a tall, slim thing with dark eyes and hasty gestures like her father. She developed stubborn, reticent moments, against which Anne thrust herself vainly.

Anne’s first jealousy licked through her veins when she saw Margaret, after a long afternoon curled up with a book, silent, almost sullen at Anne’s approach, fling aside book and mood at her father’s homecoming. Anne heard them in the library, Margaret’s light voice chording with Robert’s tone. She went to the door, shaken with a forlorn desire to beg them to admit her, but pride held her outside.

The sound of those voices, however, stood out as the first, faint rumble in Anne’s clear sky. “It was ridiculous of Robert to take the child so seriously, to talk with her as though she were a grown person,” she thought; she added hastily, a surface thought, “Of course, I want the children to be real friends with their father. It’s only that he’s spoiling her!”

Margaret came in from school one day, her eyes alight.

“Mother, the girls are going to Miss Truesdale’s camp this summer. Could I go?”

Anne asked which girls were going, and added, gently, “Mother would rather have her girl with her.”

“Oh, mother!” cried Margaret, and then was silent, her whole slight figure stiffening into protest.

“Wouldn’t you rather stay with mother?”

Margaret lifted her dark eyes, and Anne had a sudden impulse to seize her, to shake out of her the hostility that lay within her glance. But she said, with her persistent gentleness, “At any rate, I should have to know more of the camp before I could decide.”

At the sight of Margaret rushing down to meet her father that evening, Anne’s decision clicked into shape. She would send the child to the camp. It would, after all, be excellent training, with the regularity of the life, and all. Margaret had been growing too fast and perhaps studying too hard. She was over-emotional.

Margaret came back after two months in the mountains, brown, slim, apparently docile. Anne had moved her household to the shore, near enough town so that Robert could spend week-ends with them. The second week of Margaret’s return Anne discovered that her casual manner of wandering down the road in the early afternoon had a definite motive; she went to intercept the postman.

Anne’s first thought was one of horror. Had a silly flirtation started. Surely Margaret was too young for that! She was only a little girl.

The next afternoon Anne followed with swift, silent feet, when she saw Margaret start down the lane. She found her on a bench near the tennis court, her dark head and slim brown throat bent over a letter.

“Oh, she is beautiful,” thought Anne, “this young girl-child of mine! I won’t have her touched—not yet—”

At her feet on the gravel, Margaret crumpled the letter into her pocket and flung back her head, scarlet running into the tan of her cheeks.

“A letter?” said Anne, as she sat down beside Margaret. “How nice!”

Margaret slipped to the end of the bench; in her bright eyes something fluttered desperately, seeking escape.

“Who is writing to you?” Anne kept her voice gentle, in spite of the inflexible impulse behind her words. As Margaret rose, poised at the edge of flight, she added, “If I weren’t sure of you, Margie, I should think you were hiding something you were ashamed of!” She saw the girl flinch.

“It’s nothing,” she protested. “Just from a friend, from Miss Innsmere at the camp.”

“Won’t you show me her letter?” Anne sat very quiet. She stretched out one firm white hand toward Margaret, and her face showed nothing of the sharp fear that circled within her. Was Margaret lying to her? “You see, mother doesn’t know her.”

“It’s just a letter to me.” The girl’s hands clenched over her pocket and she retreated a step.

Anne rose deliberately and laid her fingers on the girl’s wrist. She was taller than Margaret; the child was a reed she could bend in her fingers. But the quiver of the wrist under her fingers disturbed her, and unexpectedly, she was aghast at the flame of defiance that leapt in the dark pupils of the girl’s eyes.

In that moment Margaret wrenched her wrist free, and with a fierce “Oh-h—” was running across the tennis court toward the shore.

At luncheon Anne felt Margaret’s eyes touch her warily; she paid no heed. Once when Margaret was a mere baby she had been stubborn, and Anne by quiet ignoring of her had brought her swiftly to her arms in hot tears.

Then she knew that she must see that letter. Quickly she went along the hall to Margaret’s room. She must protect the child. There lay the child’s dress, but her fingers found no letter in the pocket. She stood in front of the little white desk, with a faint smile at the tiny yellow shells laid in a row along the top, and the flat, bleached sand-dollars, one at each corner of the blue blotter. Just a child, after all! Like a distant echo Anne felt the slow rhythm of the days before Margaret’s birth, when all her life had turned inward, dream-woven, to the making of this child.