to me with extended hands.

"Seer Marcous--" she whispered.

I took her hands in mine.

"Oh, my dear," said I, "why did you leave me?"

"I was wicked. And I was a little fool," said Carlotta.

I sighed, released her, walked a bit apart. There was a blubber from the
egregious old woman in the threshold.

"Oh, Monsieur is not going to drive her away."

I turned upon her.

"Instead of standing there weeping like a fountain and doing nothing,
why aren't you getting Mademoiselle's room ready for her?"

"Because Monsieur has the key," wailed Antoinette.

"That's true," said I.

Then I reflected on the futility of converting bedchambers into
mausoleums for the living. The room shut up for a year would not be
habitable. It would be damp and inch-deep in dust.

"Mademoiselle shall sleep in my room to-night," I said, "and Stenson can
make me up a bed and put what I want here. Go and arrange it with him."

Antoinette departed. I turned to Carlotta.

"Are you very tired, my child?"

"Oh, yes--so tired."

"Why didn't you write, so that things could have been got ready for
you?"

"I don't know. I was too unhappy. Seer Marcous--" she said after a
little pause and then stopped.

"Yes?"

"I am going to have a baby."

She said it in the old, childlike way, oblivious of difference of sex;
with her little foreign insistence on the final consonants. I glanced
hurriedly at her. The fact was obvious. She stood with her hands
helplessly outspread. The pathos of her would have wrung the heart of a
devil.

"Thank God, you've come home," said I, huskily.

She began to cry softly. I put my arm round her shoulders, and comforted
her. She sobbed out incoherent things. She wished she had never seen
Pasquale. I was good. She would stay with me always. She would never run
away again.

I took her upstairs, and opened the door of her room with the key that I
had carried for a year on my bunch, and turned on the electric light.

"See what are still usable of your old things," said I, "and I will send
Antoinette up to you."

She looked around her, somewhat puzzled.

"Why should I sleep in your room when this one is ready for me--my night
dress--even the hot water?"

"My dear," said I, "that hot water was put for you a year ago. It must
be cold now."

"And my red slippers--and my dressing-gown!" she cried, quaveringly.

Then sinking in a heap on the floor beside the dusty bed, she burst into
a passion of tears.

I