“Do you really want me to take the boys away for a few days?” asked Billy, who was kneeling down for a better view of mother and child.

Susan’s eyes widened with instant alarm.

“Why should you?” she asked, cool fingers tightening on his.

“I thought you had no further use for the sex,” answered Billy meekly.

“Oh—–?” Susan dimpled.  “Oh, she’s too little to really absorb me yet,” she said.  “I’ll continue a sort of superficial interest in the boys until she’s eighteen or so!”

Sometimes echoes of the old life came to her, and Susan, pondering them for an hour or two, let them drift away from her again.  Billy showed her the headlines one day that told of Peter Coleman’s narrow escape from death, in his falling airship, and later she learned that he was well again and had given up aeronautics, and was going around the world to add to his matchless collection of semi-precious stones.  Susan was sobered one day to hear of Emily Saunders’ sudden death.  She sat for a long time wondering over the empty and wasted life.  Mrs. Kenneth Saunders, with a smartly clad little girl, was caught by press cameras at many fashionable European watering-places; Kenneth spent much of his time in institutions and sanitariums, Susan heard.  She heard that he worshipped his little girl.

And one evening a London paper, at which she was carelessly glancing in a library, while Billy hunted through files nearby for some lost reference, shocked her suddenly with the sight of Stephen Bocqueraz’s name.  Susan had a sensation of shame and terror; she shut the paper quickly.

She looked about her.  Two or three young men, hard-working young men to judge from appearance, were sitting with her at the long, magazine-strewn table.  Gas-lights flared high above them, soft footfalls came and went in the warm, big room.  At the desk the librarian was whispering with two nervous-looking young women.  At one of the file-racks, Billy stood slowly turning page after page of a heap of papers.  Susan looked at him, trying to see the kind, keen face from an outsider’s viewpoint, but she had to give up the attempt.  Every little line was familiar now, every little expression.  William looked up and caught her smile and his lips noiselessly formed, “I love you!”

“Me?” said Susan, also without a voice, and with her hand on her heart.

And when he said “Fool!” and returned grinning to his paper, she opened her London sheet and turned to the paragraph she had seen.

Not sensational.  Mr. Stephen Bocqueraz, the well-known American writer, and Mrs. Bocqueraz, said the paragraph, had taken the house of Mrs. Bromley Rose-Rogers for the season, and were being extensively entertained.  Mr. and Mrs. Bocqueraz would thus be near their daughter, Miss Julia Bocqueraz, whose marriage to Mr. Guy Harold Wetmore, second son of Lord Westcastle, would take place on Tuesday next.

Susan told Billy about it late that night, more because not telling him gave the thing the importance inseparable from the fact withheld than because she felt any especial pang at the opening of the old wound.