When George came up to luncheon, which he did sometimes now, he went straight to the nursery for a glimpse of his daughter.  Ever since little Frances had lost her first hair and gained her golden down, he had taken an interest in the rapid stages of her development; and, though he never “wasted time,” as he said, in the nursery, he liked to look in once a day and see whether or not she had changed in the night.  On her side the baby treated her father as if he were an inexhaustible family joke, to be enjoyed not too seriously, but with a polite recognition of its humorous points.  If she were sucking her bottle when he entered, she immediately stopped and laughed at him while the rubber nipple dropped from her toothless gums; if she awoke and discovered him at the side of her crib, she greeted him with subdued but inappeasable merriment; if he lifted her in his arms, her crocheted shoes could barely contain the kicks of her ecstatic feet.  And because she was a jolly little beggar, George grew, after a time, to cherish a certain fondness for her.  There was some use in a laughing baby, but he hated anything, child, woman, or animal, that cried.

On this particular day the baby happened to be asleep when he entered, so, without stopping, he went into Gabriella’s bedroom, where the perfume of roses mingled with the scent of the burning logs on the andirons.

“That’s a good fire,” he observed, stopping on the hearth-rug.  “I don’t wonder you hate to go out.”

“Yes, the room was a little chilly, so I lit the fire for the baby’s bath.  I don’t usually have one,” replied Gabriella, explaining her apparent extravagance.

“Has she been well?”

“She is always well.  I haven’t had a day’s anxiety about her since she was born.”

“But she isn’t very old yet.”  Already little Frances was supplying conversational material to her parents.

“I wish you would sit down, George,” said Gabriella, with a change of tone.  “I want to read you a part of a letter from mother.”

“Can’t you tell me instead?”

“If you’d rather.  You know I never told mother why we couldn’t have her to live with us.  I never told her anything.  I simply made excuses.”

“That was all right, wasn’t it?” He was plainly nervous.

“At the time I thought I couldn’t do differently, but now—­”

She gave him the letter, and while he unfolded it awkwardly, she watched him anxiously and yet without interrupting his reading.  Beyond the simple facts, she had told him nothing, and it was characteristic of her that she did not embellish these facts with picturesque phrases.  She herself was so insensible to the appeal of rhetoric that she hardly thought of it as likely to influence anybody.  Then, too, in moments of intense feeling she had always a sensation of dumbness.

“I’m awfully sorry about her illness,” he said, “but when you think of it, the best thing that could have happened to her was not to come to New York.  This climate would have been the end of her.”