the two of them adoringly.

"A puffic' fibbous!" she ejaculated. "And, what's more, the puffic'
image of his popper!"

But, by this time, Scott Brenton felt no chill at the suggestion of the
likeness of this pink and curly little being to himself. The baby was
four days old; already he seemed to Brenton to have curled his rosy
little self into his father's inmost heart. Already, too, the father
was learning the mingled joy and pain of looking towards the future:
the joy of anticipating all that his boy might become, the pain of
knowing how fast and how irrevocably the baby days were passing on. He
longed to see his child a full-grown man, a happier, better man than he
himself had ever been. He also longed to hold fast to each one of the
hours of babyhood, to keep them from slipping out from actual existence
into the vague horizon of more or less distant memory.

And then, one day, a new thought struck him. What if, in time, the
child slipped, too? That night, he walked the study floor till dawn.
Next day, he went to see Professor Opdyke in his private laboratory.
All this time, he had been lavishing his entire stock of pity upon
Reed. He knew better now, saw things by far more clearly. The almost
imperceptible weight across his blanket-covered knees had been enough
to open a new vein of understanding, a dawning realization of just what
it was that the past year had brought to Professor Opdyke, as much,
indeed, as to Reed, his son. He went to see Professor Opdyke and, after
blundering through the inevitable vague preliminaries, he came directly
to the point and, out of his six days' experience of fatherhood, he
gave to the professor a sympathetic comfort hitherto denied him.

It was the first of many similar lessons Brenton received from the warm
contact of the shrimp-like bundle on his knees, the first and therefore
memorable. It was also memorable for quite another reason: the renewal
of his intimacy with the professor and the private laboratory.

Of late, this intimacy had been dropping out of sight a little.
Whatever time that Brenton took for visiting the Opdykes, quite as a
matter of course he had been lavishing on Reed. It never had occurred
to him till now that, quite as much as Reed, Reed's father might be
needing the tonic of outside visitations, the stimulus of contacts
alien to his daily cares, the sympathetic comradeship of an individual
able to arouse him from the alternate contemplation of his official