r quiet mother the dog-like quality of
love in spite of cruelty. To Howard he stormed. He considered Elinor's
infatuation indecent. She was not a Cardew. The Cardew women had some
pride. And Howard, his handsome figure draped negligently against the
library mantel, would puzzle over it, too.

"I'm blessed if I understand it," he would say.

Elinor's child had been a boy, and old Anthony found some balm in
Gilead. Jim Doyle had not raised a finger to beckon, and if he knew of
his son, he made no sign. Anthony still ignored Elinor, but he saw in
her child the third generation of Cardews. Lily he had never counted. He
took steps to give the child the Cardew name, and the fact was announced
in the newspapers. Then one day Elinor went out, and did not come back.
It was something Anthony Cardew had not counted on, that a woman could
love a man more than her child.

"I simply had to do it, father," she wrote. "You won't understand, of
course. I love him, father. Terribly. And he loves me in his way, even
when he is unfaithful to me. I know he has been that. Perhaps if you had
wanted me at home it would have been different. But it kills me to leave
the baby. The only reason I can bring myself to do it is that, the way
things are, I cannot give him the things he ought to have. And Jim does
not seem to want him. He has never seen him, for one thing. Besides--I
am being honest--I don't think the atmosphere of the way we live would
be good for a boy."

There was a letter to Grace, too, a wild hysterical document, filled
with instructions for the baby's care. A wet nurse, for one thing. Grace
read it with tears in her eyes, but Anthony saw in it only the ravings
of a weak and unbalanced woman.

He never forgave Elinor, and once more the little grocer's curse
thwarted his ambitions. For, deprived of its mother's milk, the baby
died. Old Anthony sometimes wondered if that, too, had been calculated,
a part of the Doyle revenge.

CHAPTER IV

While Grace rested that afternoon of Lily's return, Lily ranged over
the house. In twenty odd years the neighborhood had changed, and only
a handful of the old families remained. Many of the other large houses
were prostituted to base uses. Dingy curtains hung at their windows,
dingy because of the smoke from the great furnaces and railroads. The
old Osgood residence, nearby, had been turned into apartments, with
bottles of milk and paper bags on its fire-escapes, and a pharmacy on
th