and that the sweeping terror for her son's health was now wrestling in her breast with a barrier that had long stood between her and the sight of him — the more so since a charge from his father kept watch over him.

The world darkened before our faces when we reached the hospital — with its calm, clean air — for all our comfort in the thought that penicillin treat-ment conquers infection with the millions of its merciful fighting armies. Yet those white halls and luxuriant gardens did not quench the outcast mother's thirst; they sharpened it — for Fouad's name was no longer on the lists: he had left the place that very morning for his father's house.

She asked the nurse, all eagerness:

"Then perhaps he is cured?!"

But he had been moved home at his father's wish, on the eve of the feast, as though some wariness had warned the man to gather the boy into his keeping — balking the mother of her object and barring the road she had taken. As we retraced our steps, a mother's sobbing reached our ears, and I cried out without thinking:

"Is it 'Rachel weeping for her children' before the 'King' is born? It is as though sickness and separation had conspired together against your Fouad. Has your resolve failed, then? Have you turned back from your purpose? Or will you go on to the house, come what may?!"

She answered me without a change of color, without the flicker of an eye, without a tremor in her voice:

"Is not Christmas the feast of pure motherhood? And is it any crime that I should seek my boy on his sickbed, wherever he may be?"

Before such insistence I followed

her like a shadow, wondering what voice had called to the outcast mother to bring her back to the fold that was forbid-den her. How many questions, indeed, came crowding upon my thoughts, which I held back when I was on the very point of flinging them at her:

Why had she fled in the first place? Where had she stayed? And what had happened, that she should repent her straying and live a life of austerity and drudgery?

For no one knew the secrets of this broken family; no man had ever put his finger on where the wrong lay or which of the two spouses it had struck. People's talk explained the husband's rage only by her infatuation with a lover, who soon cast her off, leaving her to wander where she would and to take shelter within the walls of the home for the crippled, in expiation of her sin.

And today she had come back to visit her sick son, whom the fever scorched, while a burning for home and hearth consumed her. We entered the house, she strain-ing toward him with suspended breath; and when she reached him she threw herself on the floor at his side, touching his hands and his chest, his neck and his cheeks, his forehead and his hair. In a moment she had gathered him into her arms, kissing the sweat that streamed from him, panting with her passion, tossed between joy and terror, union and parting, washing the phantoms of her forebodings in her pouring tears, broken by sighs of prayer...

And it was as if the "solitude of the garden" had come before the birth of the "gentle Lamb"... How true, in such an hour of agony and struggle, the saying: "The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." And the Almighty willed to grant the grace of life to the child in the hands of

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