'Mine, mine, my own!' he shall hear a voice--'Renounce! renounce! this is
not thine!'"

"He shall succeed?"

He said, "He shall fail. When he runs with others they shall reach the
goal before him. For strange voices shall call to him and strange lights
shall beckon him, and he must wait and listen. And this shall be the
strangest: far off across the burning sands where, to other men, there is
only the desert's waste, he shall see a blue sea! On that sea the sun
shines always, and the water is blue as burning amethyst, and the foam is
white on the shore. A great land rises from it, and he shall see upon the
mountain-tops burning gold."

The mother said, "He shall reach it?"

And he smiled curiously.

She said, "It is real?"

And he said, "What IS real?"

And she looked up between his half-closed eyelids, and said, "Touch."

And he leaned forward and laid his hand upon the sleeper, and whispered to
it, smiling; and this only she heard--"This shall be thy reward--that the
ideal shall be real to thee."

And the child trembled; but the mother slept on heavily and her brain-
picture vanished. But deep within her the antenatal thing that lay here