bag and
shawl Noel followed, telling the driver to wait.

It was a miserable little house, poor and cheap, and empty, and but for
the counteracting effect of his anger against Dallas, Noel thought he
must have almost sobbed to see Christine here. Dallas himself was not at
all discomposed as he recognized his visitor and asked him in, offering
a hand which Noel managed to touch.

The baby was still asleep, and when Christine had placed it carefully on
a wretched little couch, she seemed, for the first time, free to think
of Noel. She turned and asked him to sit down--at the same time glancing
about her with a sudden rush of consciousness, which until now a nearer
interest had crowded out. The poverty-stricken look of her surroundings
was made the more evident by the few objects belonging to other days
that lay about--a charming sacque, smartly braided and lined with rich
silk, hung on the back of a chair, and a handsome travelling rug was
folded under the baby on the sofa. Everything was clean, for Christine
even yet had not come to contemplate the possibility of doing without a
servant.

There was a small kerosene lamp on a table, over which were spread a
lot of cards with their faces up. Some one had evidently been playing
solitaire, and as evidently, on the witness of another sense, been
accompanying the game by the smoking of bad tobacco. The room reeked
with it to a degree that made Noel feel it an outrage to Christine. But
what was he to do? There was but one thing. He said good-by and went
away, carrying the memory of Christine's face flushed scarlet for shame.

He remembered afterward that Dallas had taken no notice of the baby--not
even glancing at it or inquiring for it--a thing which the poor mother
had taken as a matter of course. He thought, as he shook hands with her
at parting, that Christine had tried to speak--perhaps a word of
thanks--but something stopped it and she let him go in silence.

The next afternoon Noel, at the same hour, went down to the wharf and
boarded the excursion boat, for the deliberate purpose of having some
practical talk with Christine. He soon found her, absorbed so completely
in the baby that his coming seemed scarcely to disturb for a moment the
intentness of her preoccupation. This, at first, made him feel a certain
irritation, but he soon had reason to congratulate himself upon an
absence of self-consciousness on her part which made it the easier for
him to put certain q