“Ah, Jimmy, why do you?” she coaxed, one slender arm about his neck.

“I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully.  “Made that way, I guess!”

For a while they were silent again, then Julia said softly: 

“After all, nothing matters as long as we love each other!”

“No, no!  You’re right, Julie,” he agreed seriously.  “That’s the only thing that counts.  And you do love me, don’t you?”

“Love you!” Julia said, with a shaky laugh.

“I get crazy notions.  I nearly go mad, sometimes,” Jim confessed.  “I get to brooding—­I know how rotten it is!” He fell silent, staring into the fire.  “Happy?” he asked presently, glancing down at her as she rested quietly in his arms.

“Oh, happy!” Julia said, a break in her voice.  “I wish I could die here, Jim.  I wish I could go to sleep here and never wake up!”

“Like me as much as that baby, eh?” he asked, in a peculiar tone.

Julia sat up to face him, her cheeks bright under loosening films of hair, her eyes starry in the firelight.

“Jimmy, you couldn’t be jealous of your own baby?”

“Oh, couldn’t I?  I can be jealous of anything and everything, sometimes.”  He fixed troubled eyes on the fire.  “I’ve been unhappy, Julie,” he confessed.

“Unhappy?  I’ve just been sick about it,” Julia said.  “I can’t believe that we’re talking about it, and it’s all over!” She sighed luxuriously.  “There’s no use of my doing anything when you’re this way, Jim—­I can’t even remember that you love me,” she went on after a silence.  “Everything seems changed and queer.  Sometimes I think you hate me, sometimes you give me such cold looks—­oh, you do, Jimmy!—­they just make me feel sick and queer all over, if you know what I mean!  And oh,” she sank back again with her head on his shoulder, “oh, if only then I could dare just come down to you here like this, and make you take me in your arms, and talk to me this way!”

“Don’t!” Jim said briefly, kissing the top of her hair.

“It just seems to smoulder in my heart!” Julia said.  “I can’t bear it!’;

“Don’t!” he said again.

“Ah, but what makes you do it, Jim?” she asked, sitting erect to rest both wrists on his shoulders, and bring her blue eyes very near his own.  Jim’s glance did not meet hers, he looked sombrely past her at the fire.  Suddenly she felt his arms tighten about her with a force that almost hurt her.

“Oh, it’s this!” he said harshly, “I love you—­you’re mine!  You’re the thing I live for, the thing I’m proudest of!  I can’t bear to think there was a time when I didn’t know you, my little innocent girl!  I can’t bear—­my God!—­to think that you cared for some one else—!”

And with swift force he got to his feet, and put her in his chair.  Julia sat motionless while he took a restless brief turn about the room.  He snatched a little jade god from the table, examined it closely, and put it down again, to come and stand with his back to the fire, one arm flung across the mantel, and his gloomy eyes fixed on her.  Julia met the rushing, engulfing wave of her own emotion bravely.