When the house was silent, and they could do nothing but await the coroner's inquest, a subdued, large, low voice spread into the air of the room from behind the heavy walls at the back.

`What is it?' said Sue, her spasmodic breathing suspended.

`The organ of the college chapel. The organist practising I suppose. It's the anthem from the seventy- third Psalm; `Truly God is loving unto Israel.''

She sobbed again. `Oh, Oh my babies! They had done no harm! Why should they have been taken away, and not I!'

There was another stillness - broken at last by two persons in conversation somewhere without.

`They are talking about us, no doubt!' moaned Sue. `'We are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men!''

Jude listened - `No - they are not talking of us,' he said. `They are two clergymen of different views, arguing about the eastward position. Good God - the eastward position, and all creation groaning!'

Then another silence, till she was seized with another uncontrollable fit of grief. `There is something external to us which says, `You shan't!' First it said, `You shan't learn!' Then it said, `You shan't labour!' Now it says, `You shan't love!''

He tried to soothe her by saying, `That's bitter of you, darling.'

`But it's true!'

Thus they waited, and she went back again to her room. The baby's frock, shoes, and socks, which had been lying on a chair at the time of his death, she would not now have removed, though Jude would fain have got them out of her sight. But whenever he touched them she implored him to let them lie, and burst out almost savagely at the woman of the house when she also attempted to put them away.

Jude dreaded her dull apathetic silences almost more than her paroxysms. `Why don't you speak to me, Jude?' she cried out, after one of these. `Don't turn away from me! I can't bear the loneliness of being out of your looks!'

`There, dear; here I am,' he said, putting his face close to hers.

`Yes.... Oh, my comrade, our perfect union - our two-in-oneness - is now stained with blood!'

`Shadowed by death - that's all.'

`Ah; but it was I who incited him really, though I didn't know I was doing it! I talked to the child as one should only talk to people of mature age. I said the world was against us, that it was better to be out of life than in it at this price; and he took it literally. And I told him I was going to have another child. It upset him. Oh how bitterly he upbraided me!'

`Why did you do it, Sue?'

`I can't tell. It was that I wanted to be truthful. I couldn't bear deceiving him as to the facts of life. And yet I wasn't truthful, for with a false delicacy I told him too obscurely. - Why was I half-wiser than my fellow-women? And not entirely wiser! Why didn't I tell him pleasant untruths, instead of half-realities? It was my want of self-control, so that I could neither conceal things nor reveal them!'

`Your plan might have been a good one for the majority of cases; only in our peculiar case it chanced to work badly perhaps. He must have known sooner or later.'