, you had 'Stashie
to wait on you."

"Yes; I had 'Stashie," admitted Lydia.

Paul perceived uneasily some enigmatic quality in her quiet answer, and
went on reasonably: "Now, Lydia, don't go making yourself out a martyr
because I didn't come back. You know I'd have come if there was anything
to be done! I'd have come from the ends of the earth to help you nurse
her if we'd had to do that! But, thank the Lord, I make enough money so
we could do better by the little tad than that!"

"Suppose I had gone to the theater that night," asked Lydia slowly.
"There was nothing I could do here."

Paul was justifiably aggrieved. "Good Lord, Lydia! I wasn't off amusing
myself! I was doing _business!_"

His special accent for the word was never more pronounced.

"Making money to pay for the trained nurses that saved her life," he
ended. His conviction of the unanswerable force of this statement put
him again in good humor. "Now, little madame, you listen to me. You're
going to take a junketing honeymoon off with me, or I'll know the reason
why! I'm going to take you up to Put-in-Bay for a vacation! Pretty near
all our card-club gang are there now, and we'll have a gay old time and
cheer you up! I bet you just let yourself go, and worried yourself into
a fever, didn't you?"

During this speech Lydia stood leaning against him, feeling the cloth of
his sleeve rough on her bare forearm, feeling the stir and life of his
body, the warmth of his breath on her face. She had an impulse to scream
wildly to him, as though to make him hear and stop and turn, before he
finally disappeared from her sight; and she faced him dumbly. There were
no words to tell him--she tried to speak, but before his absent, kind,
wandering eyes, a foreknowledge of her own inarticulateness closed her
lips. He had not been there, and so he would never know. She stirred,
moved away, and rearranged the flowers in a vase. "Oh, yes; I worried,
of course," she said. "The baby was awfully sick for three days."

She felt desperately that she was failing in the most obvious duty not
to try to make him understand what had happened in his absence. She
bethought herself of one fact, the mere statement of which should tell
him a thousand times more eloquently than words, something of what she
had suffered. "The doctor told me twice that she wouldn't have been sick
if she hadn't been weaned." She said this with an accent of immense
significance, clasping her hands together