“Thank God,” he cried, “it is a boy!”

“And Margaret?” I gasped.

“Is doing very well!” He touched a bell, and gave an order to the servant.  “We will drink to the dear girl and to the heir of the house.”

He was in great spirits.  The doctor joined us, but I noticed that he was anxious, and he did not stay long.  Henderson was in and out, talking, excited, restless.  But everything was going very well, he thought.  At last, as we sat talking, a servant appeared at the door, with a frightened look.

“The baby, sir!”

“What?”

Alas! there had been an heir of the house of Henderson for just two hours; and Margaret was not sustaining herself.

Why go on?  Henderson was beside himself; stricken with grief, enraged, I believe, as well, at the thought of his own impotence.  Messengers were despatched, a consultation was called.  The best skill of the city, at any cost, was at Margaret’s bedside.  Was there anything, then, that money could not do?  How weak we are!

The next day the patient was no better, she was evidently sinking.  The news went swiftly round the city.  It needed a servant constantly at the door to answer the stream of sympathetic inquirers.  Reporters were watching the closed house from the opposite pavement.  I undertook to satisfy some of them who gained the steps and came forward, civil enough and note-books in hand, when the door was opened.  This intrusion of curiosity seemed so dreadful.

The great house was silent.  How vain and empty and pitiful it all seemed as I wandered alone through the gorgeous apartments!  What a mockery it all was of the tragedy impending above-stairs—­the approach on list-shod feet of the great enemy!  Let us not be unjust.  He would have come just the same if his prey had lain in a farmhouse among the hills, or in a tenement-house in C Street.

A day and a night, and another day—­and then!  It was Miss Forsythe who came down to me, with strained eyes and awe in her face.  It needed no words.  She put her face upon my shoulder, and sobbed as if her heart were broken.

I could not stay in the house.  I went out into the streets, the streets brilliant in the sun of an autumn day, into the town, gay, bustling, crowded, pulsing with vigorous life.  How blue the sky was!  The sparrows twittered in Madison Square, the idlers sat in the sun, the children chased their hoops about the fountain.

I wandered into the club.  The news had preceded me there.  More than one member in the reading-room grasped my hand, with just a word of sympathy.  Two young fellows, whom I had last seen at the Henderson dinner, were seated at a small table.

“It’s rough, Jack”—­the speaker paused, with a match in his hand—­“it’s rough.  I’ll be if she was not the finest woman I ever knew.”

My wife and I were sitting in the orchestra stalls of the Metropolitan.  The opera was Siegfried.  At the close of the first act, as we turned to the house, we saw Carmen enter a box, radiant, in white.  Henderson followed, and took a seat a little in shadow behind her.  There were others in the box.  There was a little movement and flutter as they came in and glasses were turned that way.