They said good night once more, and she was falling asleep when he pulled her hair gently.  He was frowning, with deep lines on his forehead.

“But look here, old lady.  If we’re going right away from everywhere without any home, where’s the child going to be born?”

“On the battlefield,” she murmured sleepily.

He groaned, and once more his impatient twistings snatched the blanket away.

“Oh damn the Keltic imagination!  Why can’t you get a grip on things and be practical?”

Once more she was wide-awake, laughing with intense enjoyment.

“I can’t see what there is to laugh at,” he protested.  “Marcella, has it occurred to you what sort of heritage this kiddy of ours has?”

Purposely misunderstanding him she flung out both arms wide, to embrace the whole of Australia, bush and forest, mountain, river and desert from sea to sea.

“You know what I mean,” he said desperately.  “Me, his father, a drunkard, with drink in his family, and you the descendant of dozens of drunkards.  And what’s more, though you are not a drunkard, you’re as mad as a hatter.  What the devil is the poor little beggar going to do?”

She was suddenly awake and very serious.

“Listen, Louis,” she said, holding his hands very tight.  “I got that jerk-back most dreadfully in Sydney.  Mrs. King was saying that the crowning mercy of her life was the fact that she hadn’t any children.  But it’s a mad, bad, heretical sort of fear, the sort of heresy against nature that people ought to be burnt at the stake for believing!  This child is no more your child and mine than Jesus was the child of Joseph the carpenter, or—­or Romulus and Remus were the children of the wolf-mother.  We’ve given him his flesh.  We’re his foster-parents, if you like.  But God and Humanity are his father and mother.  I found all this out one night on the roof in Sydney.  He’s a little bit of the spirit of God incarnate for awhile.”

“Keltic imagination,” he said tentatively.

“Very well, then.  If you don’t like it my way, I’ll put it in the scientific way.  You twitted me once for forgetting that biology applied to us two.  Doesn’t it apply here?  Biology shows that nature’s pushing out, paring down weaknesses and things that get in the way.  If a drunkard—­who is a weakness, a scar on the face of nature—­was going to have drunkard babies, nature would make something happen to drunkards so that they can’t have children at all....”

“She does—­in the last stages,” murmured Louis.

“That’s a good thing, perhaps.  But I don’t believe in inheriting things like drinking.  I don’t believe my people inherited it at all.  They inherited a sort of temperament, perhaps—­and it was the sort of temperament that was accessible to drink-hunger.  People talk about drinking, or other weaknesses being in their families.  Drinking seems to be in most families nowadays, simply because