ed at him in that remote and quiet
regard.

"Men are queer. If you had been suffering, I would never have run
away."

He wanted to expostulate, to explain how different such a case would
be; how, as a matter of course, a wife's place was beside her husband
in good and ill, most particularly ill--but he did not find the heart
to do it. She looked so fatigued and was so deadly quiet. He felt at a
loss, and looked around vaguely till his eye lighted on the cot.
There, beneath the muslin and ribbon which had at last been crisply
laundered, lay a burden, now minute, but about to cling and grow like
an Old Man of the Sea.

"How's the baby?" he asked, tiptoeing to it.

"It's a girl," said Marie; "I expect you've been told."

He had not been told, having made no inquiry. Here again the
story-books which had informed him of romantic life in his very young
days had been at fault; they made such an idealised picture of all
that had just taken place, and they told about the joy in the heart of
a man and the ecstasy in the heart of a woman. Osborn looked down upon
a tiny, red and crumpled face.

"I expect she'll grow up as pretty as her mother," he said with an
effort, "but now she's--she's curious, isn't she?"

With what relief he hailed the return of the nurse? It was so late
that she was stern and cross and cold with him as she shut him out.

Little George awoke at the sounds, cautious though they were, of his
father's undressing, and, crying for mummie, could not be consoled
until lifted out, and wildly and clumsily petted and lied to, and
cajoled. Even then he did not trust this daddy who was such a stranger
in the house; who was only jolly by fits and starts when they all woke
up in the pink room in the mornings; who hid behind a paper at
breakfast, and who, going away in a hurry directly afterwards, only
returned after George was asleep, or simulating sleep under threat of
a slapping. The baby missed his mother's loving arms and cried
miserably, hunched uncomfortably in Osborn's. But at last he must
sleep through sheer drowsiness, and they both went to bed. In the
morning Osborn dressed him before he went away, and was called upon to
make himself generally useful, and made to memorise a string of
errands.

The nurse would have no nonsense. She demanded and he complied.

He cursed her within himself. What a pack!

During those days once more Desmond was good to him, sheltering him at
his club, inviting him to pl