em and was daily usurping his place in his wife's thoughts. At
first he had been fool enough to imagine that it was going to be the
link that would bind them closer together, instead of which it was the
wedge that was surely driving them asunder. For its sake she was ready
to put the seas and continents between them, and treat him as if he were
of secondary importance in her life--the being who had to provide the
wherewithal on which the human idol might be suitably reared. His own
personal need of her was viewed as masculine self-indulgence and lack of
spirituality.

"I don't think you half realise what a wonderful thing has happened,"
she had once said in the midst of her baby-worship. "Here is a miracle
straight from God. A man-child who, if properly cared for, will become a
useful citizen of the Empire; and he is my VERY OWN--yours, too," she
condescended to add with her exquisite smile.

"But where do I come in? I, who am already a useful citizen of the
Empire?" he had delicately insinuated. "With due regard to nature and
the multiplication table----"

She had considered him coarse and had refused to smile. The matter of a
family was entirely in God's hands and not to be treated with levity. He
could have added a rider to that, but refrained; she was only a little
girl of nineteen lacking the logical sense in the usual, adorable,
feminine way. He was not hankering considerably after a family in the
plural sense when in imagination he could see an intensification of the
present situation which was forcing him into the background of domestic
life. The baby, waking and sleeping, and all its multifarious concerns
occupied its mother's time to the exclusion of all else, and it was no
wonder that the father was feeling injured and a trifle lonely.

Yet, in her childish way, she was fond of him, while unconsciously
learning from him that, after all, men were truly long-suffering and
unselfish creatures, patient, and forgiving.

So he possessed his soul in patience, never tired of recalling the
supreme episode of their married life, when, after the birth of their
son, she had embraced him with a new affection, spontaneous and sincere.
She had been so utterly ill that for a day and a night her life had hung
in the balance, while he, like a maniac, had paced the footpath in mist
and rain, praying as he had never prayed before for her restoration. It
was in Darjeeling where he had gone hurriedly on receipt of a telegram,