“What could I do?” he asked her pleadingly.

She opened her eyes again and looked at him in that remote and quiet regard.

“Men are queer.  If you had been suffering, I would never have run away.”

He wanted to expostulate, to explain how different such a case would be; how, as a matter of course, a wife’s place was beside her husband in good and ill, most particularly ill—­but he did not find the heart to do it.  She looked so fatigued and was so deadly quiet.  He felt at a loss, and looked around vaguely till his eye lighted on the cot.  There, beneath the muslin and ribbon which had at last been crisply laundered, lay a burden, now minute, but about to cling and grow like an Old Man of the Sea.

“How’s the baby?” he asked, tiptoeing to it.

“It’s a girl,” said Marie; “I expect you’ve been told.”

He had not been told, having made no inquiry.  Here again the story-books which had informed him of romantic life in his very young days had been at fault; they made such an idealised picture of all that had just taken place, and they told about the joy in the heart of a man and the ecstasy in the heart of a woman.  Osborn looked down upon a tiny, red and crumpled face.

“I expect she’ll grow up as pretty as her mother,” he said with an effort, “but now she’s—­she’s curious, isn’t she?”

With what relief he hailed the return of the nurse?  It was so late that she was stern and cross and cold with him as she shut him out.

Little George awoke at the sounds, cautious though they were, of his father’s undressing, and, crying for mummie, could not be consoled until lifted out, and wildly and clumsily petted and lied to, and cajoled.  Even then he did not trust this daddy who was such a stranger in the house; who was only jolly by fits and starts when they all woke up in the pink room in the mornings; who hid behind a paper at breakfast, and who, going away in a hurry directly afterwards, only returned after George was asleep, or simulating sleep under threat of a slapping.  The baby missed his mother’s loving arms and cried miserably, hunched uncomfortably in Osborn’s.  But at last he must sleep through sheer drowsiness, and they both went to bed.  In the morning Osborn dressed him before he went away, and was called upon to make himself generally useful, and made to memorise a string of errands.

The nurse would have no nonsense.  She demanded and he complied.

He cursed her within himself.  What a pack!

During those days once more Desmond was good to him, sheltering him at his club, inviting him to play golf, or to run out into the country with him in his two-seater.  Once they took George because the nurse was so firmly decided that they should do so, and they stayed out past his bedtime, and tired him out, and made him furious.

“It’s a gay life!” said Osborn to Rokeby, “a gay life, what?”

Marie sent the nurse away at the end of three weeks, and tackled her increased household alone.  She was unable to nurse the baby, and the doctor ordered it to be fed upon the patent food which George used to have, so she was obliged to ask Osborn to increase the housekeeping allowance.