salary afresh, and could do no more than cut down his weekly
expenditure of ten shillings to five.

But Marie and the baby were worth it all--if only he could get them
alone again.

A week after that the nurse left and Osborn came back to Marie's room.

He looked forward to it; part of the dreadfulness of the past month
had been their separation; now they were to be alone again, without
that anarchic and despotic pack. On the morning, before he left, he
wished the nurse good-bye with a false heartiness and handed her,
breezily, a cheque. He would see her no more, God be thanked! When he
came home that evening his place would be his own, his wife his own,
the baby their own; there would be no stranger intruding upon their
snug intimacy.

Osborn's heart was light when, at six o'clock, he put his latchkey
into the keyhole and entered; he gave the long, low coo-ee which
recalled old glad days, and Marie emerged from the kitchen, finger on
mouth.

"Hush, don't wake him!"

"Is he in bed?"

"Nurse stayed to put him to bed before she left."

Osborn embraced her. "We're alone at last, hurrah!"

"Will you help me?" said Marie. "I'm so tired."

"Course I'll help you, little dear," he replied tenderly. "We'll do
everything together, just as we used to."

"Osborn," said Marie suddenly, "that's the whole secret of married
life, to do everything together, nice things and nasty things."

"Of course, darling. We do, don't we?"

"I suppose we do," she answered doubtfully; "at least there are some
things a man doesn't share because he can't."

Her eyes dilated, and he guessed what she was thinking of. "I know,
sweetest, I know," he said hastily, "but try not to remember it; it's
all over and done with; and, Marie, I suffered, too."

She remembered, then, the tears they had shed together on the night of
the baby's birth, and her heart was soft.

The night seemed punctuated to Osborn by the crying of the baby. It
woke at regular hours, as if it could read some clock in the darkness;
and quickly as, it seemed to him, he must have roused, Marie had
wakened quicker, and was hushing the child. He could hear her soft
whispers through the darkness, in the subsequent silences during which
he guessed, with a thrill of anxious awe, that she was feeding it;
frail as she was, she gave of what strength she had to the baby. Never
had Marie seemed more wonderful to Osborn.

Very early in the morning she was tending the baby; he wish