ther's neck, and it said:
"Don't c'y! I want to s'eep wif you! I'se so s'eepy!"

She caught the child to her wet face, smiled at it through her tears,
went with it to her own bed, put it away in the deep whiteness, kissed
it, and fondled it away again into the heaven of sleep. When this was
done she felt calmer. How she hungered over it! This--this could not be
denied her. This, at least, was all hers, without clause or reservation,
an absolute love, and an absolute right.

She disrobed and drew in beside the child, and its little dewy cheek
touching her breast seemed to ease the ache in her soul.

But sleep would not come. All the past four years trooped by, with their
thousand incidents magnified in the sharp, throbbing light of her mind,
and at last she knew and saw clearly what was before her, what trials,
what duty, and what honour demanded--her honour.

Richard? Once for all she gently put him away from her into that
infinite distance of fine respect which a good woman can feel, who has
known what she and Richard had known--and set aside. But he had made for
her so high a standard, that for one to be measured thereby was a severe
challenge.

Could Frank come even to that measure? She dared not try to answer the
question. She feared, she shrank, she grew sick at heart. She did not
reckon with that other thing, that powerful, infinite influence which
ties a woman, she knows not how or why, to the man who led her to the
world of motherhood. Through all the wrongs which she may suffer by him,
there runs this cable of unhappy attraction, testified to by how many
sorrowful lives!

But Lali was trying to think it out, not only to feel, and she did
not count that subterranean force which must play its part in this new
situation in her drama of life. Could she love him? She crept away out
of the haven where her child was, put on her dressing-gown, went to the
window, and looked out upon the night, all unconscious that her husband
was looking at her from the Square below. Love him?--Love him?--Love
him? Could she? Did he love her? Her eyes wandered over the Square.
Nowhere else was there a light, but a chimney-flue was creaking
somewhere. It jarred on her so that she shrank. Then all at once she
smiled to think how she had changed. Four years ago she could have slept
amid the hammers of a foundry. The noise ceased. Her eyes passed from
the cloud of trees in the Square to the sky-all stars, and restful deep
blue. That