"Oh, I hope not. I want it so much to be a reality--"

He paused to smile at the limitations of a world in which jokes were
not realities, and continued gently: "But since it is one already--"

"To us, I mean: to you and me. I want--" her voice wavered, and her
eyes with it. "I have always wanted so dreadfully...it has been such a
disappointment...not to..."

"I see," said Lethbury slowly.

But he had not seen before. It seemed curious, now, that he had never
thought of her taking it in that way, had never surmised any hidden
depths beneath her outspread obviousness. He felt as though he had
touched a secret spring in her mind.

There was a moment's silence, moist and tremulous on her part, awkward
and slightly irritated on his.

"You've been lonely, I suppose?" he began. It was odd, having suddenly
to reckon with the stranger who gazed at him out of her trivial eyes.

"At times," she said.

"I'm sorry."

"It was not your fault. A man has so many occupations; and women who
are clever--or very handsome--I suppose that's an occupation too.
Sometimes I've felt that when dinner was ordered I had nothing to do
till the next day."

"Oh," he groaned.

"It wasn't your fault," she insisted. "I never told you--but when I
chose that rose-bud paper for the front room upstairs, I always
thought--"

"Well--?"

"It would be such a pretty paper--for a baby--to wake up in. That was
years ago, of course; but it was rather an expensive paper... and it
hasn't faded in the least..." she broke off incoherently.

"It hasn't faded?"

"No--and so I thought...as we don't use the room for anything ... now
that Aunt Sophronia is dead...I thought I might... you might...oh,
Julian, if you could only have seen it just waking up in its crib!"

"Seen what--where? You haven't got a baby upstairs?"

"Oh, no--not _yet_," she said, with her rare laugh--the girlish
bubbling of merriment that had seemed one of her chief graces in the
early days. It occurred to him that he had not given her enough things
to laugh about lately. But then she needed such very elementary things:
it was as difficult to amuse her as a savage. He concluded that he was
not sufficiently simple.

"Alice," he said, almost solemnly, "what _do_ you mean?"

She hesitated a moment: he saw her gather her courage for a supreme
effort. Then she said slowly, gravely, as though she were pronouncing a
sacramental phrase:

"I'm so lonely without a little child--and I t