“I’m sorry Jane Cobden was so foolish as to bring home that baby,” she began.

“Why?” said the doctor, without lifting his eyes from the book he was reading.

“Oh, she lays herself open to criticism.  It is, of course, but one of her eccentricities, but she owes something to her position and birth and should not invite unnecessary comment.”

“Who criticises her?” asked the doctor, his eyes still on the pages.

“Oh, you can’t tell; everybody is talking about it.  Some of the gossip is outrageous, some I could not even repeat.”

“I have no doubt of it,” answered the doctor quietly.  “All small places like Warehold and Barnegat need topics of conversation, and Miss Jane for the moment is furnishing one of them.  They utilize you, dear mother, and me, and everybody else in the same way.  But that is no reason why we should lend our ears or our tongues to spread and encourage it.”

“I quite agree with you, my son, and I told the person who told me how foolish and silly it was, but they will talk, no matter what you say to them.”

“What do they say?” asked the doctor, laying down his book and rising from his chair.

“Oh, all sorts of things.  One rumor is that Captain Holt’s son, Barton, the one that quarrelled with his father and who went to sea, could tell something of the child, if he could be found.”

The doctor laughed.  “He can be found,” he answered.  “I saw his father only last week, and he told me Bart was in Brazil.  That is some thousand of miles from Paris, but a little thing like that in geography doesn’t seem to make much difference to some of our good people.  Why do you listen to such nonsense?” he added as he kissed her tenderly and, with a pat on her cheek, left the room for his study.  His mother’s talk had made but little impression upon him.  Gossip of this kind was always current when waifs like Archie formed the topic; but it hurt nobody, he said to himself—­nobody like Jane.

Sitting under his study lamp looking up some complicated case, his books about him, Jane’s sad face came before him.  “Has she not had trouble enough,” he said to himself, “parted from Lucy and with her unsettled money affairs, without having to face these gnats whose sting she cannot ward off?” With this came the thought of his own helplessness to comfort her.  He had taken her at her word that night before she left for Paris, when she had refused to give him her promise and had told him to wait, and he was still ready to come at her call; loving her, watching ever her, absorbed in every detail of her daily life, and eager to grant her slightest wish, and yet he could not but see that she had, since her return, surrounded herself with a barrier which he could neither understand nor break down whenever he touched on their personal relations.

Had he loved her less he would, in justice to himself, have faced all her opposition and demanded an answer—­Yes or No—­as to whether she would yield to his wishes.  But his generous nature forbade any such stand and his reverence for her precluded any such mental attitude.