His Other Wife: A Novel — page 95: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

RACHEL’ S COMMANDS. 87 But the time came when all her womanhood turned to motherhood, and she merged the passion of the wife into the tenderness of maternity. Faith was the representative of the one grand and perfect sentiment of her life. Her soul bowed down and worshiped the father and the child in one. This atom of her husband’s being that she had carried in her breast, and nourished on ‘her heart’s blood, now ascended the empty throne in her life, and reigned there with an absolute despotism. The thought came often to Rachel’s heart that, some day, when her feeble life quite flickered out, she would, in a dying confession, reveal her identity, and leave this beautiful angel as her vicegerent to comfort and bless the declining years of him whose love she had failed to win. Until then little Faith must take her chances, for not even the consideration for her child’s future ever gave her a thought of marring her husband’s, by the announce- ment of her own existence. Uriel had enough and to spare, and he never wearied of telling Rachel that the white day in his life was that which gave him little Faith to love and cherish. It needs not that all the history of these years in Uriel’s home. be set down here. They were very uneventful up to the time when Faith Hilary reached her sixteenth year. The joyous dawn-time, while still the dews of childhood glistened on: the swelling flower-bud, shed on Faith’s beauty all the ineffable flush and charm that mark the Eomiecbooks.co =|