“Don’t say it all over again.”

She went with her waddling gait, agitatedly, to the door.

“Good night,” she said.  “Be very, very kind to Marie, won’t you?”

“I don’t need anyone to tell me how to treat my own wife,” he replied stiffly.

“Oh, Osborn, don’t be offended.”

“I’m not offended,” he said shortly.  “Good night, and thanks for staying in, and lighting the fire and all that.”

He did not remain to watch her slow progress down the stone stairs, but closed the door and went back to the fire.  He pulled out his pipe, filled and lighted it.  There descended upon him that feeling of hopeless exasperation which many a young man has felt in many such a situation.  When one married did one’s liabilities never cease?  Did they never even remain stationary, allowing a man to settle his course and keep to it, in spite of the boredom involved?  Would life be always just a constant ringing of the changes on paying the rent, paying the instalment on the furniture, paying the doctor, paying the nurse, paying to go for one anxious week to Littlehampton?  Wasn’t there some alternative?

All a man appeared able to do was to escape for furtive minutes from his chains, to steal furtive shillings from his obligations and spend them otherwise.

A lot of men seemed to keep sane under the most unfavourable conditions.

When Osborn had sucked his pipe to the very last draw, he got up with a heavy sigh, stretched himself, took the coal off the fire to effect the minute saving, and went to undress.  He wondered whether Marie really was still awake.

She was, and she was lying wide-eyed and watchful for him.  As he opened the door cautiously he heard the rustle of her head moving on the pillow, and then the movement of her whole body turning towards him.  Her anxiety filled the air with the sense of one poignant question:  “Do you know?”

In answer to her unspoken inquiry he went at once to her side, and laid his hand upon her head, where the hair, smoothly parted for the night, looked sleek and innocent like a little girl’s.

“Your mother told me,” he began; then he bent and kissed her.  “I’m awf’ly sorry.  I s’pose we’ve got to make the best of it, old thing.  I will if you will.  It’s the very devil, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she sighed.

CHAPTER XIV

DRIFTING

The second baby came in the middle of a blazing summer, unheralded by the hopes, by the buds and blossoms of loving thought, which had opened upon the first child’s advent.  Marie was remorsefully tender over it, but Osborn continued to be one long uninterrupted sigh.  The doctor and nurse seemed to him voracious, greedy creatures seeking for his life-blood.  His second child was born at midnight.  He came in one day at 6.30 with the fear in his heart men know round and about these agitating times, and found that fear was justified.  The nurse had already been sent for, the doctor had looked in once, and the grandmother, fierce and tearful, was putting the first baby to bed.  She put it to bed in Osborn’s dressing-room, intimating that he would be responsible for it during the night for the next three weeks, anyway.