“All very well, but how’s my wife?” Warren Gregory might ask, kissing her over the baby’s bobbing head.

“Lovely!  Do you know that your son weighs fifteen pounds—­isn’t that amazing?” Rachael would hang on his free arm, in happy wifely fashion, as they went back to the house.

“Want to go with me to London?” he asked her one day in the late fall when they were back in town.

“Why not Mars?” she asked placidly, putting a fresh, stiff dress over Jimmy’s head.

“No, but I’m serious, my dear girl,” Warren Gregory said surprised.  “But—­I don’t understand you.  What about Jim?”

“Why, leave him here with Mary.  We won’t be gone four weeks.”

Rachael smiled, but it was an uneasy, almost an affronted, smile.

“Oh, Warren, we couldn’t!  I couldn’t!  I would simply worry myself sick!”

“I don’t see why.  The child would be perfectly safe.  George is right here if anything happened!”

“George—­but George isn’t his mother!” Rachael fell silent, biting her lip, a little shadow between her brows.  “What is it—­the convention?” she presently asked.  “Do you have to go?”

“It isn’t absolutely necessary,” Warren said dryly.  But this was enough for Rachael, who opened the subject that evening when George and Alice Valentine were there.

“George, does Warren have to go to this London convention, or whatever it is?”

“Not necessarily,” smiled Doctor Valentine.  “Why, doesn’t he want to go?”

“I don’t want him to go!” Rachael asserted.

“It would be a senseless risk to take that baby across the ocean,” Alice contributed, and no more was said of the possibility then or at any other time, to Rachael’s great content.

But when the winter season was well begun, and Jimmy delicious in his diminutive furs, Doctor Gregory and his wife had a serious talk, late on a snowy afternoon, and Rachael realized then that her husband had been carrying a slight sense of grievance over this matter for many weeks.

He had come in at six o’clock, and was changing his clothes for dinner, half an hour later, when Rachael came into his dressing-room.  Her hair had been dressed, and under her white silk wrapper her gold slippers and stockings were visible, but she seemed disinclined to finish her toilette.

“Awful bore!” she said, smiling, as she sat down to watch him.

“What—­the Hoyts?  Oh, I don’t think so!” he answered in surprise.

“They all bore me to death,” Rachael said idly.  “I’d rather have a chop here with you, and then trot off somewhere all by ourselves!  Why don’t they leave us alone?”

“My dear girl, that isn’t life,” Warren Gregory said firmly.  His tone chilled her a little, and she looked up in quick penitence.  But before she could speak he antagonized her by adding disapprovingly:  “I must say I don’t like your attitude of criticism and ungraciousness, my dear girl!  These people are all our good friends; I personally can find no fault with them.  You may feel that you would rather spend all of your time hanging over Jim’s crib—­I suppose all young mothers do, and to a certain extent all mothers ought to—­but don’t, for heaven’s sake, let everything else slip out of your life!”