All this was deplorably true.  And yet no one could say that Kitty in this checkered year had done her husband much harm.  Ashe was no longer her blind slave; and his career had carried him to heights with which even his mother might have been satisfied.  Sometimes Margaret was inclined to think that Kitty had now less influence with him and his mother more than was the just due of each.  She—­the younger woman—­felt the tragedy of Ashe’s new and growing emancipation.  Secretly—­often—­she sided with Kitty!

* * * * *

“Margaret!”

The voice was Kitty’s.  She came running out, her pale-pink skirts flying round her.  “Have you seen the babe?”

Margaret replied that he and his nurse were just in sight.

Kitty fled over the lawn to meet the child’s perambulator.  She lifted him out, and carried him in her arms towards Margaret and Lady Tranmore.

“Isn’t it piteous?” said Margaret, under her breath, as the mother and child approached.  Lady Tranmore gave her a sad, assenting look.

For during the last six months the child had shown signs of brain mischief—­a curious apathy, broken now and then by fits of temper.  The doctors were not encouraging.  And Kitty varied between the most passionate attempts to rouse the child’s failing intelligence and days—­even weeks—­when she could hardly bring herself to see him at all.

She brought him now to a seat beside Lady Tranmore.  She had been trying to make him take notice of a new toy.  But the child looked at her with blank and glassy eyes, and the toy fell from his hand.

“He hardly knows me,” said Kitty, in a low voice of misery, as she clasped her hands round the baby of three, and looked into his face, as though she would drag from it some sign of mind and recognition.

But the blue eyes betrayed no glimmer of response, till suddenly, with a gesture as of infinite fatigue, the child threw itself back against her, laying its fair head upon her breast with a long sigh.

Kitty gave a sob, and bent over him, kissing—­and kissing him.

“Dear Kitty!” said Lady Tranmore, much moved.  “I think—­partly—­he is tired with the heat.”

Kitty shook her head.

“Take him!” she said to the nurse—­“take him!  I can’t bear it.”

The nurse took him from her, and Kitty dried her tears with a kind of fierceness.

“There is the post!” she said, springing up, as though determined to throw off her grief as quickly as possible, while the nurse carried the child away.

The footman brought the letters across the lawn.  There were some for Lady Tranmore and for Margaret French.  In the general opening and reading that ensued, neither lady noticed Kitty for a while.  Suddenly Margaret French looked up.  She saw Kitty sitting motionless with a book on her lap, a book of which the wrapper lay on the grass beside her.  Her finger kept a page; her eyes, full of excitement, were fixed on the distant horizon of the park; the hurried breathing was plainly noticeable under the thin bodice.