-room. And please, there was to be lots of jam for tea,
Mrs. Tailleur said. The manager's wife looked humble before her lord as
she booked that order.

That was at twelve o'clock of the tenth day.

Seven hours later Mrs. Tailleur was alone in her private sitting-room,
preparing with some agitation for the appointment that she had.

CHAPTER XIII

Her tense, flushed mind recorded automatically, and with acute
vividness, every detail of the room; the pattern of the gray French
wall-paper, with the watered stripe, and of the hot, velvet upholstery,
buff on a crimson ground; the architecture of the stained walnut
sideboard and overmantel, with their ridiculous pediments and little
shelves and bevelled mirrors; the tapestry curtains, the palms in
shining turquoise blue pots, and the engraved picture of Grace Darling
over the sideboard.

It was absolutely necessary that she should have this place to see him
in, without Robert seeing him. Beyond that immediate purpose she
discerned its use as a play-room for Robert's children.

To-morrow, at four o clock, she would be waiting there for them. They
had settled that, she and Robert. She was to have everything ready, and
the table laid for tea. To-morrow they would all be sitting there, round
the table. To-morrow she would see Robert's children, and hold them in
her arms.

Her heart gave a sudden leap, as if something had quickened in it. Her
brain glowed. Her pulses throbbed with the race of the glad blood in her
veins. Her whole being moved, trembling and yearning, toward an
incredible joy. Till that moment she had hardly realised Robert's
children. A strange unquietness, not yet recognised as fear, had kept
her from asking him many questions about them. Even now, their forms
were like the forms of children seen in the twilight of dreams, the
dreams of women who have never had children; forms that hover and
torture and pursue; that hide their faces, half seen; that will not come
to the call, nor be held by the hand, nor gathered to the heart.

That she should really see them, and hear their voices, and hold them in
her arms, to-morrow, seemed to her a thing impossible, beyond
credibility or dream. Then she said to herself that it all depended on
what happened between to-morrow and to-day.

It was not long past seven and she had still a good twenty minutes
before her. She spent it in pacing up and down the room, and looking at
the clock every time she turned and