He looked forward to it; part of the dreadfulness of the past month had been their separation; now they were to be alone again, without that anarchic and despotic pack.  On the morning, before he left, he wished the nurse good-bye with a false heartiness and handed her, breezily, a cheque.  He would see her no more, God be thanked!  When he came home that evening his place would be his own, his wife his own, the baby their own; there would be no stranger intruding upon their snug intimacy.

Osborn’s heart was light when, at six o’clock, he put his latchkey into the keyhole and entered; he gave the long, low coo-ee which recalled old glad days, and Marie emerged from the kitchen, finger on mouth.

“Hush, don’t wake him!”

“Is he in bed?”

“Nurse stayed to put him to bed before she left.”

Osborn embraced her.  “We’re alone at last, hurrah!”

“Will you help me?” said Marie.  “I’m so tired.”

“Course I’ll help you, little dear,” he replied tenderly.  “We’ll do everything together, just as we used to.”

“Osborn,” said Marie suddenly, “that’s the whole secret of married life, to do everything together, nice things and nasty things.”

“Of course, darling.  We do, don’t we?”

“I suppose we do,” she answered doubtfully; “at least there are some things a man doesn’t share because he can’t.”

Her eyes dilated, and he guessed what she was thinking of.  “I know, sweetest, I know,” he said hastily, “but try not to remember it; it’s all over and done with; and, Marie, I suffered, too.”

She remembered, then, the tears they had shed together on the night of the baby’s birth, and her heart was soft.

The night seemed punctuated to Osborn by the crying of the baby.  It woke at regular hours, as if it could read some clock in the darkness; and quickly as, it seemed to him, he must have roused, Marie had wakened quicker, and was hushing the child.  He could hear her soft whispers through the darkness, in the subsequent silences during which he guessed, with a thrill of anxious awe, that she was feeding it; frail as she was, she gave of what strength she had to the baby.  Never had Marie seemed more wonderful to Osborn.

Very early in the morning she was tending the baby; he wished that he had been able to keep the nurse longer.  He left her reluctantly after breakfast, to get through the baby’s bath and toilet unaided, before the heavier work of the flat.  Women who knew would have understood why Marie trembled and despaired at the tasks before her.  When the baby cried as, with hands still weakened, she tried to hold up its slipping little body in the bath, she cried, too.  As she cried, she thought how tears seemed to be always near her eyes during these married days.  Was something wrong with marriage?  Before, in her careless girl-days, she had never wept; she had never so suffered, so wearied and despaired.  While she questioned, she dressed the baby in the flannel and lawn things she had made for it a long while ago, and when she had dressed it, she fed it again, and again it slept.