Years ago Edith had asked him to teach her some of his mother's cradle songs.

And the one which she was singing to-night was a song he had heard when he was small, when the mountain storms had shrieked and beat upon the rattling old house and he had been frightened and had cried out and his mother had come to his bed in the dark.

He felt as though she were near him now.

And as he listened to the song, from the deep well of sentiment which was a part of Roger Gale rose memories that changed his mood, and with it his sense of proportions.
Here was motherhood of the genuine kind, not orating in Cooper Union in the name of every child in New York, but crooning low and tenderly, soothing one little child to sleep, one of the five she herself had borne, in agony, without complaint.

How Edith had slaved and sacrificed, how bravely she had rallied after the death of her husband.