er!" he gave forth. "The great, fresh-coloured lumping
brute! What did she come into it for? Of all the devilish things that
can happen to a man, the worst is to be born to the thing I was born to.
To know through your whole life that you're just a stone's-throw from
rank and wealth and splendour, and to have to live and look on as an
outsider. Upon my word, I've felt more of an outsider just because of
it. There's a dream I've had every month or so for years. It's a dream
of opening a letter that tells me he's dead, or of a man coming into the
room or meeting me in the street and saying suddenly, 'Walderhurst died
last night, Walderhurst died last night!' They're always the same words,
'Walderhurst died last night!' And I wake up shaking and in a cold sweat
for joy at the gorgeous luck that's come at last."

Hester gave a low cry like a little howl, and dropped her head on her
arms on the table among the cups and saucers.

"She'll have a son! She'll have a son!" she cried. "And then it won't
matter whether _he_ dies or not."

"Ough!" was the sound wrenched from Osborn's fury. "And our son might
have been in it. Ours might have had it all! Damn--damn!"

"He won't,--he won't now, even if he lives to be born," she sobbed, and
clutched at the dingy tablecloth with her lean little hands.

It was hard on her. She had had a thousand feverish dreams he had never
heard of. She had lain awake hours at night and stared with wide-open
eyes at the darkness, picturing to her inner soul the dream of splendour
that she would be part of, the solace for past miseries, the high
revenges for past slights that would be hers after the hour in which she
heard the words Osborn had just quoted, "Walderhurst died last night!"
Oh! if luck had only helped them! if the spells her Ayah had taught her
in secret had only worked as they would have worked if she had been a
native woman and had really used them properly! There was a spell she
had wrought once which Ameerah had sworn to her was to be relied on. It
took ten weeks to accomplish its end. In secret she had known of a man
on whom it had been worked. She had found out about it partly from the
remote hints which had aided her half knowledge of strange things and by
keeping a close watch. The man had died--he had died. She herself, and
with her own eyes had seen him begin to ail, had heard of his fevers and
pains and final death. He had died. She knew that. And she had tried the
thing hersel