“Julia?” Marie said to herself, all wonder, "Julia!"

She looked at Rokeby’s creaseless back, at his fingers wandering over the keys, and for the first time she noticed how sensitive, how caressing the fingers were.  Yet that two people in her intimate circle could contemplate that through which she herself had passed painfully, as through ordeal by fire....

It made her very kind to them both, though a small stir of queer jealousy was in her.  Before hell they would know heaven.  Love and marriage began with the celestial tour....

When they came out into the hall presently, to put on their outdoor wraps, she beckoned them to the door of the children’s room.  The baby had joined the two elder ones, and three small cots now stood in a row, closely packed.  A night-light gave enough glimmer to see the warm faces lying peacefully on the three pillows.  The women crept in and looked down upon a scene which will always make women’s hearts sing, or ache; and Rokeby followed.  To his lover’s mind, never had Julia Winter appeared so adorable as when she bent low over the fat baby, and murmured to it the small feckless loving things that all women always have murmured to all the babies in the world.  She touched its outflung hand delicately with a finger, and lingered there, filled with woman’s world-old want.  And out of the twilight Marie sent a whisper which reached them both.

“Of course, you’re never going to marry, either of you.  But if you ever want to, and you’re hanging back, wondering, just don’t wonder.  Remember that the children are worth—­everything.”

“Thank you,” Rokeby whispered fervently in her ear.

Julia said nothing, but straightened herself and passed out.

Rokeby was after her in a second to hold her coat.  The way in which she turned her back on him so that he might lift it on was peculiarly ungracious.

Marie was in the background, wanting a lover again.  When they had gone she drew back the curtains, threw up the windows, and leaned out into the sweet, chill spring night.  She drank it and loved it, and all her being cried out for love.

But she did not want love grown old, which came in and put on its slippers, and grumped:  “Can’t those kids keep quiet?” if it heard the voice of the children of love, and which hid itself behind a hedge of daily paper, or flung out again from home, in the ill-tempered senility of its second childhood.

She wanted love new-grown; with a bloom upon it, fresh and young; love at its beginning, before it was ripe and over-ripe, and spoiling and falling from its tree; such a love as she imagined Julia and Desmond even then to be driving towards.

In a taxicab—­for where else in all London could he be alone with her?—­Rokeby was taking Julia home.  She allowed it in spite of herself; yet was angry with them both for the circumstance which brought them together close, which enclosed them in a privacy which made her remember, with a vividness which disturbed her, the sensations of that first and only kiss.  He was asking her again: