le intolerable situation. This hasn't been a home for
the last three or four years; it's been nothing but a nursery. And
about all I've been is a retriever for a _creche_, a clod-hopper to
tiptoe about the sacred circle and see to it there's enough flannel to
cover their backs and enough food to put into their stomachs. I'm an
accident, of course, an intruder to be faced with fortitude and borne
with patience."

"This sounds quite disturbing," I interrupted. "It almost leaves me
suspicious that you are about to emulate the rabbit and devour your
young."

Dinky-Dunk fixed me with an accusatory finger.

"And the fact that you can get humor out of it shows me just how far
it has gone," he cried with a bitterness which quickly enough made me
sober again. "And I could stand being deliberately shut out of your
life, and shut out of their lives as far as you can manage it, but I
can't see that it's doing either them or you any particular good."

"But I am responsible for the way in which those children grow up," I
said, quite innocent of the _double entendre_ which brought a dark
flush to my husband's none too happy face.

"And I suppose I'm not to contaminate them?" he demanded.

"Haven't you done enough along that line?" I asked.

He swung about, at that, with something dangerously like hate on his
face.

"Whose children are they?" he challenged.

"You are their father," I quietly acknowledged. It rather startled me
to find Dinky-Dunk regarding himself as a fur coat and my offspring as
moth-eggs which I had laid deep in the pelt of his life, where we were
slowly but surely eating the glory out of that garment and leaving it
as bald as a prairie dog's belly.

"Well, you give very little evidence of it!"

"You can't expect me to turn a cart-wheel, surely, every time I
remember it?" was my none too gracious inquiry. Then I sat down. "But
what is it you want me to do?" I asked, as I sat studying his face,
and I felt sorriest for him because he felt sorry for himself.

"That's exactly the point," he averred. "There doesn't seem anything
to do. But this can't go on forever."

"No," I acknowledged. "It seems too much like history repeating
itself."

His head went down, at that, and it was quite a long time before he
looked up at me again.

"I don't suppose you can see it from my side of the fence?" he asked
with a disturbing new note of humility in his voice.

"Not when you force me to stay on the fence," I tol