Nurse Maynard could hear again the weary, complaining voice, trailing off at last in the silence of exhaustion, and an impulse of indignation added a sharp edge to her tone as she responded to Hugh’s query.

“Her ladyship is asking to see you, Sir Hugh.  She ought to rest now, but she is too excited.  She has been expecting you.”

There was no mistaking the implied rebuke in the last sentence, and Hugh’s face darkened.

“I’ll come,” he said, briefly, and followed the crisp starched figure up the stairs and into a half-darkened room, smelling faintly of antiseptics.

Vaguely the white counterpane outlined the slim figure of Diane upon the bed.  The nurse raised the blind a little, and the light of the westering sun fell across the pillow, revealing a small, dark head which turned eagerly at the sound of Hugh’s entrance.

“Hugh!” The voice from the bed came faintly.

Hugh looked down at his wife.  Probably never had Diane looked more beautiful.

The little worldly, sophisticated expression common to her features had been temporarily obliterated by the holy suffering of motherhood, and the face of the “foreign dancing-woman,” born and bred in a quarter of the world where virtue is a cheap commodity, was as pure and serene as the face of a Madonna.

She held out her hands to her husband, her lips curving into a smile that was all love and tenderness.

“Hugh—­mon adore!”

The lover in him sent him swiftly to her side, and as he drew her into his arms she let her head fall back against his shoulder with a tremulous sigh of infinite content.

And then, from the firelit corner of the room, came the sound of a feeble wailing.  Hugh started as though stung, and his eyes left his wife’s face and riveted themselves upon the figure in the low chair by the hearth—­Virginie, rocking a little as she sat, and crooning a Breton lullaby to the baby in her arms.

In a moment remembrance rushed upon him, cutting in twain as though with a dividing sword this exquisite moment of reunion with his wife.  Insensibly his arms relaxed their clasp of the frail body they held, and Diane, sensing their slackening, looked up startled and disconcerted.

Her eyes followed the direction of his glance, then, coming back to his face, searched it wildly.  Instantly she knew the meaning of that suddenly limp clasp and all that it implied.

“Hugh!” The throbbing tenderness had gone out of her voice, leaving it dry and toneless.  “Hugh!  You don’t mean . . . you’re angry that it’s a girl?”

He looked down at her—­at the frightened eyes, the lovely face fined by recent pain, and all his instinct was to reassure and comfort her.  But something held him back.  The old, narrow creed in which he had been reared, whose shackles he had broken through when he had recklessly followed the bidding of his heart and married Diane, was once more mastering him—­bidding him resist the natural human impulses of love and kindliness evoked by his wife’s appeal.