“I see,” said Lethbury slowly.

But he had not seen before.  It seemed curious, now, that he had never thought of her taking it in that way, had never surmised any hidden depths beneath her outspread obviousness.  He felt as though he had touched a secret spring in her mind.

There was a moment’s silence, moist and tremulous on her part, awkward and slightly irritated on his.

“You’ve been lonely, I suppose?” he began.  It was odd, having suddenly to reckon with the stranger who gazed at him out of her trivial eyes.

“At times,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“It was not your fault.  A man has so many occupations; and women who are clever—­or very handsome—­I suppose that’s an occupation too.  Sometimes I’ve felt that when dinner was ordered I had nothing to do till the next day.”

“Oh,” he groaned.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she insisted.  “I never told you—­but when I chose that rose-bud paper for the front room upstairs, I always thought—­”

“Well—?”

“It would be such a pretty paper—­for a baby—­to wake up in.  That was years ago, of course; but it was rather an expensive paper... and it hasn’t faded in the least...” she broke off incoherently.

“It hasn’t faded?”

“No—­and so I thought...as we don’t use the room for anything ... now that Aunt Sophronia is dead...I thought I might... you might...oh, Julian, if you could only have seen it just waking up in its crib!”

“Seen what—­where?  You haven’t got a baby upstairs?”

“Oh, no—­not yet,” she said, with her rare laugh—­the girlish bubbling of merriment that had seemed one of her chief graces in the early days.  It occurred to him that he had not given her enough things to laugh about lately.  But then she needed such very elementary things:  it was as difficult to amuse her as a savage.  He concluded that he was not sufficiently simple.

“Alice,” he said, almost solemnly, “what do you mean?”

She hesitated a moment:  he saw her gather her courage for a supreme effort.  Then she said slowly, gravely, as though she were pronouncing a sacramental phrase: 

“I’m so lonely without a little child—­and I thought perhaps you’d let me adopt one....It’s at the hospital...its mother is dead...and I could...pet it, and dress it, and do things for it...and it’s such a good baby...you can ask any of the nurses...it would never, never bother you by crying...”

II

Lethbury accompanied his wife to the hospital in a mood of chastened wonder.  It did not occur to him to oppose her wish.  He knew, of course, that he would have to bear the brunt of the situation:  the jokes at the club, the inquiries, the explanations.  He saw himself in the comic role of the adopted father, and welcomed it as an expiation.  For in his rapid reconstruction of the past he found himself cutting