dashed off the candle-shades first.

"What a day!" she gasped.

Early morning and the awakening in the cold, the brushing of grates
and the lighting of fires, the sweeping and cooking, to get a man off
warmed and comfortable to business; the long, long hours of silence
and domestic tasks, waiting for his return; his return to his food;
his departure again; a desolate evening of silence and domestic
tasks--these were that span of hope and promise called a day.

Married life!

CHAPTER XIII

"THE VERY DEVIL"

When spring had passed, and part of the summer, the Osborn Kerrs did
as all their neighbours did; they packed up their best clothes, folded
the baby's cot, swathed the ten-guinea perambulator, and with the baby
and his cumbersome impedimenta, made an exhausting effort and went to
the sea.

They did not go to the sea altogether lightly; it had cost a great
deal of thought and arithmetic and discussion as to a stopping-place.
Osborn was keen on a boarding-house; he knew a jolly one where he had
stayed before, but Marie vetoed that. They wouldn't have babies in
boarding-houses; they wouldn't like her keeping the perambulator
there, and wheeling it through the hall; likewise they wouldn't like
her intruding into the back regions with it. She knew that what one
did with a young family was to take rooms, and cater for oneself. So
they wrote to engage rooms, and after much correspondence found what
would suit their purse, and started for a week by the sea.

The baby fretted a little during its unaccustomed travelling, and,
fretting, fretted its parents. Osborn was dimly annoyed with Marie for
not being able to keep the baby up to the best standard of infantile
behaviour, feeling that the things he was called upon to do, in a
public railway carriage, made him look a fool; and Marie was hurt with
Osborn that he should show so little sympathy and patience. She wrote,
upon arrival, a letter to Mrs. Amber, which brought her down within a
couple of days, to stay at a boarding-house within a stone's throw.

Grandmother was very good. She was always nice-tempered and kind and
soothing. In the morning she came round early to the rooms in a side
street, and took the baby out for his airing upon the promenade, so
that Marie and Osborn might bathe together. She it was who persuaded
their landlady to take charge of the baby for just one hour, one
afternoon, while Marie and Osborn came to take fashionable tea with
her