; but--" Then he wondered, with a sudden pang of hope,
if anything had happened to--_It_? "They're born dead, sometimes!"
Nothing wrong in wishing that, for the Thing would be better off dead
than alive. He wished he was dead himself! ... The third time he came
to the apartment house the string of the box was cutting into his
fingers, and that made him stop, and set his teeth, and push open the
door of the vestibule. He touched the button under the name "Dale," and
called up, huskily, "Is Miss--Mrs. Dale in?" A brisk voice asked his
name. "A friend of Mrs. Dale's," he said, very low. There seemed to be
a colloquy somewhere, and then he was told to "come right along!" He
turned to the stairway, and as he walked slowly up, it came into his
mind that this was the way a man might climb the scaffold steps:
Step... Step... Step--his very feet refusing! Step... Step--and Lily's
door. The nurse, who met him on the landing, said Mrs. Dale would be
glad to see him....

She was in bed, very white and radiant, and with a queer, blanketed
bundle on one arm; if she was, as the nurse said, "glad to see him," she
did not show it. She was too absorbed in some gladness of her own to
feel any other kind of gladness. As Maurice handed her the box of roses,
she smiled vaguely and said. "Why, you're real kind!" Then she said,
eagerly, "He was born the day the pink hyacinth came out! Want to see
him?" Her voice thrilled with joy. Without waiting for his answer--or
even giving a look at the roses the nurse was lifting out of their waxed
papers, she raised a fold of the blanket and her eyes seemed to feed on
the little red face with its tightly shut eyes and tiny wet lips.

Maurice looked--and his heart seemed to drop, shuddering, in his breast.
"How nasty!" he thought; but aloud he said, stammering, "Why it's--quite
a baby."

"You may hold him," she said; there was a passionate generosity in her
voice.

Maurice tried to cover his recoil by saying, "Oh, I might drop it."

Lily was not looking at him; it seemed as if she was glad not to give up
the roll of blankets, even for a minute. "He's perfectly lovely. He's a
reg'lar rascal! The doctor said he was a wonderful child. I'm going to
have him christened Ernest Augustus; I want a swell name. But I'll call
him Jacky." She strained her head sidewise to kiss the red, puckered
flesh, that looked like a face, and in which suddenly a little orifice
showed itself, from which came a small, squeakin