until she could work out something better.

But the pattern, it seemed, was cut differently. She went to the
doctor's office the day after Portia took her mother away, and
discovered the cause of her physical wretchedness. She was pregnant.

CHAPTER VIII

A BIRTHDAY

Rodney heard young Craig, who deviled up law for him, saying good night
to the stenographer; glanced at his watch and opened the door to his
outer office.

"You may go home, Miss Beach," he said. "I'm staying on for a while but
I shan't want you." Then, to the office boy: "You, too, Albert."

He waited till he heard them go, then went out and disconnected his own
desk telephone, which the office boy, on going home, always left plugged
through; went back into his inner office again and shut the door after
him.

There was more than enough pressing work on his desk to fill the clear
hour that remained to him before he had to start for home. But he didn't
mean to do it. He didn't mean to do anything except drink down thirstily
the sixty minutes of pure solitude that were before him; to let his mind
run free from the clutch of circumstance. That hour had become a habit
with him lately, like--he smiled at the comparison--like taking a drug.
When something happened that forced him to forego it, he felt
cheated--irrationally irritable. He was furtive about it, too. He never
corrected Rose's assumption that the thing which kept him late at the
office so much of the time nowadays was a press of work. He even
concealed the fact that he pulled his telephone plug, by sticking it
back again every night just before he left.

He tried to laugh that guilty feeling out of existence. But he couldn't.
He knew too well whence it sprang. He knew whom he was stealing that
hour from. It wasn't the world in general he intrenched himself against.
It was his wife. The real purpose of that sixty minutes was to enable
him to stop thinking and feeling about her.

It was not that she had faded for him--become less the poignant, vivid,
irresistible thing he had first fallen in love with. Rather the
contrary. The simple rapture of desire that had characterized the period
of their engagement and the first months of their marriage, had lost
something--not so much, either--of its tension. But it had
broadened--deepened into something more compelling, more
pervasive--more, in his present mood, formidable.

She hadn't seemed quite well, lately, nor altogether happy, and he