“Mother, you shouldn’t trouble yourself!  But how nice it is!” She drank gratefully, then put the usual question with the usual anxiety: 

“Babes been well?  And good?”

“They’ve been lambs,” said Grannie warmly.

“What a pity I folded up Osborn’s bed, and put it in the children’s room!  You could have slept here to-night, mother.”

“My duck, I’d rather sleep in my own bed,” said the old lady, “and I’ll be putting my things on, and going there now.  You have the woman coming in the morning?”

“Yes—­and every morning.”

Mrs. Amber nodded approvingly.

“You’ll be very comfortable now, love.”

Then she muffled herself in her wraps and went out bravely into the cold towards the old-fashioned flat across the Heath; and Marie, undressing, went to her bed, too.  How still it was!  The tiny breaths of the baby scarce stirred the immediate air.

Where would Osborn be now?

CHAPTER XVIII

INTRIGUE

Osborn passed that first night at the best hotel in Liverpool.  The term “expenses” provided for the best, in reason, of everything; and a good man at his job need not be afraid of making claims.  Osborn was going to be a very good man at his job and, somehow, without any undue swelling of the head, he knew it.  His chance had come, the big chance which had laid poor Woodall low, and sent him up, up, rejoicing.  When they carried his rather goodlooking luggage—­which he had bought new for his honeymoon—­into a palatial bedroom of the Liverpool hotel, he experienced, only with a thousand degrees more conviction, that sense of freedom from care which his wife was even then timidly grasping, far away in London.  He was provided for handsomely and agreeably for three hundred and sixty-five days.

All his liabilities were provided for, too.  No unexpected call could come to him, no fingers delve into the purse that he might now keep privately to himself.  He was going out into a big world where life had never taken him before, and he was going untrammeled; strong, young.

Osborn dressed for dinner that evening; he wore the links his mother-in-law had given him as a wedding present, and a shirt whose laundering had been paid for out of that omnipresent thirty-two-and-sixpence, and the jacket cut by the tailor whom he had never been able to afford since.  He looked a very nice young man, fresh, broad and spruce, but not too spruce; open-browed, clear-eyed and keen.  He was now at the zenith of his physical strength, in his thirty-second year, untired and still eager.  As he dressed, he looked at himself in the glass as a man regards himself upon his wedding day.

He had remembered to find out about mails from Cook’s and, before going in to dinner, sat down in a great lounge and scribbled a note to his wife; just this information, love, and a further injunction to take care of herself; and no more.  Like other husbands who had been similarly placed domestically, he had no idea how this process of taking care was to be accomplished by a harassed and busy woman, but it was some satisfaction to express a verdant hope that it should be done.