Gyp took up the baby, whose black eyes fixed themselves on her mother in a momentary contentment; but, at the first movement, she began again her fretful plaint.  Betty went on: 

“She’s been like that ever since this morning.  Mr. Fiorsen’s been in more than once, ma’am, and the fact is, baby don’t like it.  He stares at her so.  But this morning I thought—­well—­I thought:  ‘You’re her father.  It’s time she was getting used to you.’  So I let them be a minute; and when I came back—­I was only just across to the bathroom—­he was comin’ out lookin’ quite fierce and white, and baby—­oh, screamin’!  And except for sleepin’, she’s hardly stopped cryin’ since.”

Pressing the baby to her breast, Gyp sat very still, and queer thoughts went through her mind.

“How has he been, Betty?” she said.

Betty plaited her apron; her moon-face was troubled.

“Well,” she said, “I think he’s been drinkin’.  Oh, I’m sure he has—­I’ve smelt it about him.  The third day it began.  And night before last he came in dreadfully late—­I could hear him staggerin’ about, abusing the stairs as he was comin’ up.  Oh dear—­it is a pity!”

The baby, who had been still enough since she lay in her mother’s lap, suddenly raised her little voice again.  Gyp said: 

“Betty, I believe something hurts her arm.  She cries the moment she’s touched there.  Is there a pin or anything?  Just see.  Take her things off.  Oh—­look!”

Both the tiny arms above the elbow were circled with dark marks, as if they had been squeezed by ruthless fingers.  The two women looked at each other in horror; and under her breath Gyp said:  “He!”

She had flushed crimson; her eyes filled but dried again almost at once.  And, looking at her face, now gone very pale, and those lips tightened to a line, Betty stopped in her outburst of ejaculation.  When they had wrapped the baby’s arm in remedies and cotton-wool, Gyp went into her bedroom, and, throwing herself down on her bed, burst into a passion of weeping, smothering it deep in her pillow.

It was the crying of sheer rage.  The brute!  Not to have control enough to stop short of digging his claws into that precious mite!  Just because the poor little thing cried at that cat’s stare of his!  The brute!  The devil!  And he would come to her and whine about it, and say:  “My Gyp, I never meant—­how should I know I was hurting?  Her crying was so—­Why should she cry at me?  I was upset!  I wasn’t thinking!” She could hear him pleading and sighing to her to forgive him.  But she would not—­not this time!  He had hurt a helpless thing once too often.  Her fit of crying ceased, and she lay listening to the tick of the clock, and marshalling in her mind a hundred little evidences of his malevolence toward her baby—­his own baby.  How was it possible?  Was he really going mad?  And a fit of such chilly shuddering seized her that she crept under the eider down to regain