“Go on into the parlor and sit down,” she said; “I’ll put him in the kitchen,” She pushed the elaborate wicker perambulator, adorned with bows of blue-satin ribbon, down a dark entry smelling of very good soup stock.  When she came back she found Maurice, his hat and stick in his hands, standing in her tiny front room, where the sunny window was full of geraniums and scraggly rose bushes.  “I got ’em in early.  And I dug up my dahlias—­I was afraid of frost. (Mercy!  I must clean that window on the outside!) Well, you are a stranger!” she said, again, good-naturedly.  Then she sighed:  “Mr. Curtis, Jacky seems kind o’ sick.  He’s been coughing, and he’s hot.  Would you send for a doctor, if you was me?”

“Why, if you’re worried, yes,” Maurice said, impatiently; “I was just passing, and—­No, thank you; I won’t sit down.  I was passing, and I thought I’d look in and give you a—­a little present.  If the youngster’s upset, it will come in well,” he ended, as his hand sought his waistcoat pocket.  Lily’s face was instantly anxious.

“What!  Did you think he looked sick, too?  I was kind of worried, but if you noticed it—­”

“I didn’t in the least,” he said, frowning; “I didn’t look at him.”

“He ’ain’t never been what you’d call sick,” Lily tried to reassure herself; “he’s a reg’lar rascal!” she ended, tenderly; her eyes—­those curious amber eyes, through which sometimes a tigress looks!—­looked now at Maurice in passionate motherhood.

Maurice, putting the money down on the table, said, “I wish I could do more for you, Lily; but I’m dreadfully strapped.”

“Say, now, you take it right back!  I can get along; I got my two upstairs rooms rented, and I’ve got a new mealer.  And if Jacky only keeps well, I can manage fine.  But that girl that’s been wheelin’ him has measles at her house—­little slut!” Lily said (the yellow eyes glared); “she didn’t let on to me about it.  Wanted her two dollars a week!  If Jacky’s caught ’em, I—­I’ll see to her!”

“Oh, he’s all right,” Maurice said; he didn’t like “it”—­although, if it hadn’t been for “it” he would probably, long before this, have slipped down into the mere comfort of Lily; “it” held him prisoner in self-contempt; “it,” or perhaps the larger It? the It which he had seen first in his glorious, passionately selfish ecstasy on his wedding day; then glimpsed in the awful orderliness of the universe,—­the It that held the stars in their courses!  Perhaps the tiny, personal thing, Joy, and the stupendous, impersonal thing, Law, and the mysterious, unseen thing, Life, were all one?  “Call it God,” Maurice had said of ecstasy, and again of order; he did not call Jacky’s milky lips “God.”  The little personality which he had made was not in the least God to him!  On the contrary, it was a nuisance and a terror, and a financial anxiety.  He shrank from the thought of it, and kept “decent,” merely through disgust at the child as an entity—­an entity which had driven him into loathsome evasions and secrecies which once in a while sharpened into little lies.  But he was faintly sorry, now, to see Lily look unhappy about the Thing; and he even had a friendly impulse to comfort her:  “Jacky’s all right!  But I’ll send a doctor in, if you want me to.  I saw a doctor’s shingle out as I came around the corner.”