“Oh, Marie!” Julia whispered, and for a while there was silence in the room, broken only by the chuckles of the baby-girl.  Both women looked down, at the sound, upon the fluffy head and Julia asked, still in a bated whisper: 

“What do you think you’ll do?”

“Nothing,” said Marie, “above all, nothing.  The children will keep us under the same roof.  We shall be like thousands of other married people, privately free; publicly tied up tight together in the same dear old knot.”

Her brief laugh trembled.

“Marie, you know you think it is a dear old knot.”

Marie did not reply.  After awhile she said: 

“We’re not coming to dinner with you for a very long while.  This morning I’ve come nearer hating you, Julia, than I’ve ever done in our lives.  I want to hate you because you’re so happy; because you’ve got the love which I want but can never have again.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Sure, my dear?  Sure as the world.  You can’t have that kind of love without giving a return, and I’ve none to give.  It’s dead; gone; dried up.  I don’t know where it is.  But perhaps there’s a root of it left somewhere—­enough to make me envy you.”

Ann the maid entered to fetch the baby to be dressed for outdoors, and Julia received the hint sorrowfully.

“Isn’t there anything Desmond and I could do?” she asked, as she stood up and muffled her furs about her throat.

“There’s nothing anyone can do.”

“I wanted to talk about a lot of things—­ask you about your fortunes, and everything, darling; but this has driven it all clean out of my head.”

“Our fortunes are on the upgrade, thanks, Julia.  Never again will I spoil my hands and let my teeth and hair go; it’s all over—­that part of it.”

Julia kissed Marie very tenderly, as she used to do.  “I shall come again soon,” she called with an anxious vivacity, as she waved her muff in a good-bye signal from a bend in the cold grey stairs.

But Marie went in again very quickly and shut the door.  She stood with her hands clenched and her breast heaving, tears running unchecked down her cheeks.

She stood on tiptoe to peer into the glass over the mantel, and the storm in her face quickened the storm in her heart.  Raging jealousy entered and possessed her.  It whirled about like a tornado, scattering before it all that was orderly, that was lesser and weaker than itself.  Marie Kerr was taken up in the grip of it, and driven along upon a headlong course which she could not pause to consider.

As she looked at herself in the glass, she cried aloud furiously:  “No one shall ever take what is mine!”

Little pulses began to hammer in her, which had not so hammered since Osborn started upon his joy-year.  No more could she bear contemplation of Julia and her delight.  She ran along the corridor to her room, calling to the maid: