The worst of his anticipations were unfulfilled.  The baby was surprisingly well and surprisingly quiet.  Such infantile remedies as she absorbed were not potent enough to be perceived beyond the nursery; and when Lethbury could be induced to enter that sanctuary, there was nothing to jar his nerves in the mild pink presence of his adopted daughter.  Jars there were, indeed:  they were probably inevitable in the disturbed routine of the household; but they occurred between Mrs. Lethbury and the nurses, and Jane contributed to them only a placid stare which might have served as a rebuke to the combatants.

In the reaction from his first impulse of atonement, Lethbury noted with sharpened perceptions the effect of the change on his wife’s character.  He saw already the error of supposing that it could work any transformation in her.  It simply magnified her existing qualities.  She was like a dried sponge put in water:  she expanded, but she did not change her shape.  From the stand-point of scientific observation it was curious to see how her stored instincts responded to the pseudo-maternal call.  She overflowed with the petty maxims of the occasion.  One felt in her the epitome, the consummation, of centuries of animal maternity, so that this little woman, who screamed at a mouse and was nervous about burglars, came to typify the cave-mother rending her prey for her young.

It was less easy to regard philosophically the practical effects of her borrowed motherhood.  Lethbury found with surprise that she was becoming assertive and definite.  She no longer represented the negative side of his life; she showed, indeed, a tendency to inconvenient affirmations.  She had gradually expanded her assumption of motherhood till it included his own share in the relation, and he suddenly found himself regarded as the father of Jane.  This was a contingency he had not foreseen, and it took all his philosophy to accept it; but there were moments of compensation.  For Mrs. Lethbury was undoubtedly happy for the first time in years; and the thought that he had tardily contributed to this end reconciled him to the irony of the means.

At first he was inclined to reproach himself for still viewing the situation from the outside, for remaining a spectator instead of a participant.  He had been allured, for a moment, by the vision of severed hands meeting over a cradle, as the whole body of domestic fiction bears witness to their doing; and the fact that no such conjunction took place he could explain only on the ground that it was a borrowed cradle.  He did not dislike the little girl.  She still remained to him a hypothetical presence, a query rather than a fact; but her nearness was not unpleasant, and there were moments when her tentative utterances, her groping steps, seemed to loosen the dry accretions enveloping his inner self.  But even at such moments—­moments which he invited and caressed—­she did not bring him nearer to his wife.  He now perceived