“She won’t believe, sir,” said the nurse, “that it will all drop off and a new crop come.”

“Oh-h!” said Carlotta.  “It can’t be so cruel.  For it is my hair —­see, Seer Marcous, darling; isn’t it just my hair?”

It was her great solicitude that the boy should resemble her.

“I don’t know about his nose,” she remarked critically.  “There is so little of it yet and it is so soft—­feel how soft it is.  But his eyes are brown like mine, and his mouth—­now look, aren’t they just the same?”

She put her cheek next to the child’s and invited me to compare the two adjacent baby mouths.  They were, of a truth, very much alike.

She was jealous of the baby, desirous of having it always with her to tend and fondle, impatient of the nurse and Antoinette.  It was a thing so intensely hers that she resented other hands touching it.  Oddly enough, of me she made an exception.  Nothing delighted her more than to put the little creature into my awkward and nervous arms, and watch me carry it about the room.  I think she wanted to give me something, and this share in the babe was the most precious gift she could devise.

Of Pasquale she continued to say nothing.  In her intense joy of motherhood he seemed to have become the dim creature of a dream.  I had registered the birth without consulting her—­in the legal names of the parents.

“What are you going to call him, Carlotta?” I asked one day.

“Mon petit chou. That’s what Antoinette says.  It’s a beautiful name.”

“There are many points in calling an infant one’s little cabbage,” I admitted, “but soon he’ll grow up to be as old as I am, and—­” I sighed, “who would call me their petit chow?”

Carlotta laughed.

“That is true.  We shall have to find a name.”  She reflected for a few moments; then put her arms round my neck and continued her reflections.

“He shall be Marcus—­another Marcus Ordeyne.  Then perhaps some day he will be ‘Seer Marcous’ like you.”

“Do you mean when I die?” I asked.

“Oh, not for years and years and years!” she cried, tightening her clasp in alarm.  “But the child lives longer than the father.  It is fate.  He will live longer than I.”

“Let us hope so, dear,” I answered.  “But it is just because I am not his father that he can’t be Sir Marcus when I die.  He can have my name; but my title—­”

“Who will have it?”

“No one.”

“It will die too?”

“It will be quite dead.”

“You are his father, you know, really,” she whispered.

“The law of England takes no count, unfortunately, of things of the spirit,” said I.

“What are things of the spirit?”

“The things, my dear,” said I, “that you are beginning to understand.”  I bent down and kissed the child as it lay on her lap.  “Poor little Marcus Ordeyne,” I said.  “My poor quaintly fathered little son, I’m afraid there is much trouble ahead of you, but I’ll do my best to help you through it.”