and spend
them otherwise.

A lot of men seemed to keep sane under the most unfavourable
conditions.

When Osborn had sucked his pipe to the very last draw, he got up with
a heavy sigh, stretched himself, took the coal off the fire to effect
the minute saving, and went to undress. He wondered whether Marie
really was still awake.

She was, and she was lying wide-eyed and watchful for him. As he
opened the door cautiously he heard the rustle of her head moving on
the pillow, and then the movement of her whole body turning towards
him. Her anxiety filled the air with the sense of one poignant
question: "Do you know?"

In answer to her unspoken inquiry he went at once to her side, and
laid his hand upon her head, where the hair, smoothly parted for the
night, looked sleek and innocent like a little girl's.

"Your mother told me," he began; then he bent and kissed her. "I'm
awf'ly sorry. I s'pose we've got to make the best of it, old thing. I
will if you will. It's the very devil, isn't it?"

"Yes," she sighed.

CHAPTER XIV

DRIFTING

The second baby came in the middle of a blazing summer, unheralded by
the hopes, by the buds and blossoms of loving thought, which had
opened upon the first child's advent. Marie was remorsefully tender
over it, but Osborn continued to be one long uninterrupted sigh. The
doctor and nurse seemed to him voracious, greedy creatures seeking for
his life-blood. His second child was born at midnight. He came in one
day at 6.30 with the fear in his heart men know round and about these
agitating times, and found that fear was justified. The nurse had
already been sent for, the doctor had looked in once, and the
grandmother, fierce and tearful, was putting the first baby to bed.
She put it to bed in Osborn's dressing-room, intimating that he would
be responsible for it during the night for the next three weeks,
anyway.

He could not bear it. He went in and kissed the silent, stone-white
Marie, looked resentfully at George, answered his mother-in-law at
random, and hurried out again. He was shivering. He remembered too
well now that day which, too easily, he had forgotten.

He neither ate nor drank; he walked the Heath madly. He told himself
that not for hundreds of precious pounds would he wait in that flat,
wait for the sounds of anguish which would inevitably rise and echo
about those circumscribed walls. The July sun went down; the moon rose
up and found him still walking; st