By this time they had reached their rooms.  Barker, apparently dismissing the subject from his mind with characteristic buoyancy, turned into the bedroom and walked smilingly towards a small crib which stood in the corner.  “Why, he’s gone!” he said in some dismay.

“Well,” said Mrs. Barker a little impatiently, “you didn’t expect me to take him into the public parlor, where I was seeing visitors, did you?  I sent him out with the nurse into the lower hall to play with the other children.”

A shade momentarily passed over Barker’s face.  He always looked forward to meeting the child when he came back.  He had a belief, based on no grounds whatever, that the little creature understood him.  And he had a father’s doubt of the wholesomeness of other people’s children who were born into the world indiscriminately and not under the exceptional conditions of his own.  “I’ll go and fetch him,” he said.

“You haven’t told me anything about your interview; what you did and what your good friend Stacy said,” said Mrs. Barker, dropping languidly into a chair.  “And really if you are simply running away again after that child, I might just as well have asked Captain Heath to stay longer.”

“Oh, as to Stacy,” said Barker, dropping beside her and taking her hand; “well, dear, he was awfully busy, you know, and shut up in the innermost office like the agate in one of the Japanese nests of boxes.  But,” he continued, brightening up, “just the same dear old Jim Stacy of Heavy Tree Hill, when I first knew you.  Lord! dear, how it all came back to me!  That day I proposed to you in the belief that I was unexpectedly rich and even bought a claim for the boys on the strength of it, and how I came back to them to find that they had made a big strike on the very claim.  Lord!  I remember how I was so afraid to tell them about you—­and how they guessed it—­that dear old Stacy one of the first.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Barker, “and I hope your friend Stacy remembered that but for me, when you found out that you were not rich, you’d have given up the claim, but that I really deceived my own father to make you keep it.  I’ve often worried over that, George,” she said pensively, turning a diamond bracelet around her pretty wrist, “although I never said anything about it.”

“But, Kitty darling,” said Barker, grasping his wife’s hand, “I gave my note for it; you know you said that was bargain enough, and I had better wait until the note was due, and until I found I couldn’t pay, before I gave up the claim.  It was very clever of you, and the boys all said so, too.  But you never deceived your father, dear,” he said, looking at her gravely, “for I should have told him everything.”

“Of course, if you look at it in that way,” said his wife languidly, “it’s nothing; only I think it ought to be remembered when people go about saying papa ruined you with his hotel schemes.”

“Who dares say that?” said Barker indignantly.