Before the doctor came again Osborn was shut out of the chamber of anguish, but the flat was small and from the farthest corner of it he heard Marie’s moans and cries and prayers.

He stood with his hands over his ears, praying, too, praying that soon it would be over, that she might not cease to love him.  “How can she ever love me again?” he thought over and over.

It seemed to him a dreadful death for love to die.

* * * * *

As September dusk was falling, after a silence like fate through the flat, Osborn heard his child’s cry.  Half an hour after that the doctor came out of the birth-place.  He walked through the open sitting-room door to the spot where Osborn stood as if transfixed and saw how the young man had suffered; but he had seen scores of such young men suffer similarly before.  He glanced around the room and saw the dead fire in the grate.  He himself looked weary.

“Buck up!” he said, with a hand on Osborn’s shoulder.  “You’ve a jolly little boy.  You look bad!  What have you been doing all this time?”

“Listening,” Osborn gasped.

“And you’ve not done any good at it, have you?” the doctor said, shaking his head.  “You might as well have cleared off, you know, on to the Heath—­saved yourself a bit.  However—­Yes, I quite understand how you felt.  You’d better have something—­a cup of tea, a whisky and soda.”

“She?” Osborn uttered.

“She’s doing all right; I shall look in again to-night.”

“She—­she had a—­a rough time?”

“Yes,” said the doctor, “girls of her type do.  We’ve progressed too far, you know, much too far, for women.  She’s suffered very much.  I’m sorry.”

“Can I see her?”

“You may go in now and stay till Nurse sends you away.”

While the doctor let himself out quietly, Osborn tiptoed down the corridor between the cream walls whose creaminess mattered so little, and the black-and-white pictures that had lost their values.  He tapped with icy finger-tips upon Marie’s door and the nurse let him in.

He looked beyond her to the bed where Marie lay, such a slim little outline under the covers, such a little, little girl to suffer tremendously.  Her eyes were open, dark and huge and horrified; over her tousled fair hair they had drawn one of the pink tulle caps, now come, indeed, into their own.

“There she is,” said the nurse cheerfully.  “We’ve made her look very smart, you see, and she’s feeling very well.  We shall get on splendidly now, and the baby’s bonnie.”

But she could fool neither of these young people; they were too modern, too analytic, too disobedient.  When the horror-struck eyes of Marie and Osborn met they knew the immensity of what had occurred.  No cheerful professional belittlement could avail.  Osborn knelt down by his wife.

“Leave her to me a bit, Nurse,” he said in a strangled voice.  “I’ll be very quiet.”