“Oh! curse her!” he gave forth.  “The great, fresh-coloured lumping brute!  What did she come into it for?  Of all the devilish things that can happen to a man, the worst is to be born to the thing I was born to.  To know through your whole life that you’re just a stone’s-throw from rank and wealth and splendour, and to have to live and look on as an outsider.  Upon my word, I’ve felt more of an outsider just because of it.  There’s a dream I’ve had every month or so for years.  It’s a dream of opening a letter that tells me he’s dead, or of a man coming into the room or meeting me in the street and saying suddenly, ’Walderhurst died last night, Walderhurst died last night!’ They’re always the same words, ‘Walderhurst died last night!’ And I wake up shaking and in a cold sweat for joy at the gorgeous luck that’s come at last.”

Hester gave a low cry like a little howl, and dropped her head on her arms on the table among the cups and saucers.

“She’ll have a son!  She’ll have a son!” she cried.  “And then it won’t matter whether he dies or not.”

“Ough!” was the sound wrenched from Osborn’s fury.  “And our son might have been in it.  Ours might have had it all!  Damn—­damn!”

“He won’t,—­he won’t now, even if he lives to be born,” she sobbed, and clutched at the dingy tablecloth with her lean little hands.

It was hard on her.  She had had a thousand feverish dreams he had never heard of.  She had lain awake hours at night and stared with wide-open eyes at the darkness, picturing to her inner soul the dream of splendour that she would be part of, the solace for past miseries, the high revenges for past slights that would be hers after the hour in which she heard the words Osborn had just quoted, “Walderhurst died last night!” Oh! if luck had only helped them! if the spells her Ayah had taught her in secret had only worked as they would have worked if she had been a native woman and had really used them properly!  There was a spell she had wrought once which Ameerah had sworn to her was to be relied on.  It took ten weeks to accomplish its end.  In secret she had known of a man on whom it had been worked.  She had found out about it partly from the remote hints which had aided her half knowledge of strange things and by keeping a close watch.  The man had died—­he had died.  She herself, and with her own eyes had seen him begin to ail, had heard of his fevers and pains and final death.  He had died.  She knew that.  And she had tried the thing herself in dead secrecy.  And at the fifth week, just as with the native who had died, she heard that Walderhurst was ill.  During the next four weeks she was sick with the tension of combined horror and delight.  But he did not die in the tenth week.  They heard that he had gone to Tangiers with a party of notable people, and that his “slight” indisposition had passed, leaving him in admirable health and spirits.