“Don’t, Joe!”

He looked up.

“I loved you so, Edith!”

“Don’t you love me now?”

“God knows I do.  I can’t get over it.  I can’t.  I’ve tried, Edith.”

He sat back on the floor and looked at her.

“I can’t,” he repeated.  “And when I saw you like that just now, with the kid in your arms—­I used to think that maybe you and I—­”

“I know, Joe.  No decent man would want me now.”

She was still strangely composed, peaceful, almost detached.

“That!” he said, astonished.  “I don’t mean that, Edith.  I’ve had my fight about that, and got it over.  That’s done with.  I mean—­” he got up and straightened himself.  “You don’t care about me.”

“But I do care for you.  Perhaps not quite the way you care, Joe, but I’ve been through such a lot.  I can’t seem to feel anything terribly.  I just want peace.”

“I could give you that,” he said eagerly.

Edith smiled.  Peace, in that noisy house next door, with children and kittens and puppies everywhere!  And yet it would be peace, after all, a peace of the soul, the peace of a good man’s love.  After a time, too, there might come another peace, the peace of those tired women in the ward, rocking.

“If you want me, I’ll marry you,” she said, very simply.  “I’ll be a good wife, Joe.  And I want children.  I want the right to have them.”

He never noticed that the kiss she gave him, over the sleeping baby, was slightly tinged with granulated sugar.

CHAPTER LI

Old Anthony’s body had been brought home, and lay in state in his great bed.  There had been a bad hour; death seems so strangely to erase faults and leave virtues.  Something strong and vital had gone from the house, and the servants moved about with cautious, noiseless steps.  In Grace’s boudoir, Howard was sitting, his arms around his wife, telling her the story of the day.  At dawn he had notified her by telephone of Akers’ murder.

“Shall I tell Lily?” she had asked, trembling.

“Do you want to wait until I get back?”

“I don’t know how she will take it, Howard.  I wish you could be here, anyhow.”

But then had come the battle and his father’s death, and in the end it was Willy Cameron who told her.  He had brought back all that was mortal of Anthony Cardew, and, having seen the melancholy procession up the stairs, had stood in the hall, hating to intrude but hoping to be useful.  Howard found him there, a strange, disheveled figure, bearing the scars of battle, and held out his hand.

“It’s hard to thank you, Cameron,” he said; “you seem to be always about when we need help.  And”—­he paused—­“we seem to have needed it considerably lately.”

Willy Cameron flushed.

“I feel rather like a meddler, sir.”

“Better go up and wash,” Howard said.  “I’ll go up with you.”