“But she writes—­she writes continually.  Tells me what he weighs, and when he’s got a fresh tooth, and how he crawls about the carpet and into her bed of a morning, and imitates the cat mewing, and drinks I don’t know how many pints of new milk a day, and all that sort of thing.  I believe the rascal has the appetite of a young tiger—­and yet I can’t pay for what he eats!  The nurse was long ago dispensed with, so that I’ve not even her board to send a cheque for, that they might by chance make a trifle of profit out of.  It seems too late now to simply take the child away, and there leave it.  I haven’t the shabby courage to do such a thing; and besides, he might come to any sort of grief, poor little chap, in that case.  There’s no doubt in the world that her taking of him and doing for him have been the salvation of his health, and perhaps his life.  And I know, by what she tells me, that he regularly dotes on her—­as so he ought—­and would howl his very head off if I took him from her.  What could I do with him if I did take him?  I’ve no home, and nobody to look after it if I had; and hired servants are the deuce with a lone man at their mercy.  It would be worse now than it was at first.  And so’—­with another heavy sigh—­’you see the situation.  I’m just swallowed up, body and bones, drowned fathoms deep in a sea of debt and obligation that I can never by any possibility struggle out of, except—­”

“Except,” continued Alice, with the candid air of a kind and sensible sister—­“except by marrying her, you mean?  Yes, I see the situation.  I appreciate your point of view.  I should understand it if it were not that she unquestionably laid the trap for you deliberately—­just as that spider laid his for moths and flies.  And marriage by capture has gone out.”

“Oh, don’t say that!” the man protested, in haste.  “I would not for a moment accuse her of that.  She was Lily’s friend; it was for her —­it was out of pure womanly compassion for the motherless child; at any rate, in the beginning.  And even now I have no right whatever to suppose—­”

“But you know it, all the same.  Every word you have said to me tells me that you know it.  You may as well be frank.”

He squirmed a little in his chair, but confessed as required.

“Well—­but it’s a caddish thing to say—­I think she does expect it.  And hasn’t she the right to expect it?  However, that’s neither here nor there.  The point is that, in common honesty and manliness, I should repay her if I can; and there’s no other way—­at least, I can’t see any other way.  It is my fault, and not hers, that I don’t take to the notion; for a better woman never walked, nor one that would make a better mother to the boy.  But, somehow, you do like to have your free choice, don’t you?” He had come as far as this—­that he could entertain the idea of choice, which meant a second choice.

“It would be utterly wrong, absolutely immoral, downright wicked, to forego it,” Alice declaimed, with energy.  “It would be nothing short of criminal, Mr Carey.”