“George Barker, if you think I am going to let you throw away and utterly waste Mr. Stacy on us, alone, in a private room with closed doors—­and I dare say you’d like to sit in your dressing-gown and slippers—­you are entirely mistaken.  I know what is due, not to your old partner, but to the great Mr. Stacy, the financier, and I know what is due from him to us!  No!  We dine in the great dining-room, publicly, and, if possible, at the very next table to those stuck-up Peterburys and their Eastern friends, including that horrid woman, which, I’m sure, ought to satisfy you.  Then you can talk as much as you like, and as loud as you like, about old times,—­and the louder and the more the better,—­but I don’t think he’ll like it.”

“But the baby!” expostulated Barker.  “Stacy’s just wild to see him—­and we can’t bring him down to the table—­though we might,” he added, momentarily brightening.

“After dinner,” said Mrs. Barker severely, “we will walk through the big drawing-rooms, and then Mr. Stacy may come upstairs and see him in his crib; but not before.  And now, George, I do wish that to-night, for once, you would not wear a turn-down collar, and that you would go to the barber’s and have him cut your hair and smooth out the curls.  And, for Heaven’s sake! let him put some wax or gum or something on your mustache and twist it up on your cheek like Captain Heath’s, for it positively droops over your mouth like a girl’s ringlet.  It’s quite enough for me to hear people talk of your inexperience, but really I don’t want you to look as if I had run away with a pretty schoolboy.  And, considering the size of that child, it’s positively disgraceful.  And, one thing more, George.  When I’m talking to anybody, please don’t sit opposite to me, beaming with delight, and your mouth open.  And don’t roar if by chance I say something funny.  And—­whatever you do—­don’t make eyes at me in company whenever I happen to allude to you, as I did before Captain Heath.  It is positively too ridiculous.”

Nothing could exceed the laughing good humor with which her husband received these cautions, nor the evident sincerity with which he promised amendment.  Equally sincere was he, though a little more thoughtful, in his severe self-examination of his deficiencies, when, later, he seated himself at the window with one hand softly encompassing his child’s chubby fist in the crib beside him, and, in the instinctive fashion of all loneliness, looked out of the window.  The southern trades were whipping the waves of the distant bay and harbor into yeasty crests.  Sheets of rain swept the sidewalks with the regularity of a fusillade, against which a few pedestrians struggled with flapping waterproofs and slanting umbrellas.  He could look along the deserted length of Montgomery Street to the heights of Telegraph Hill and its long-disused semaphore.  It seemed lonelier to him than the