During the days of Lorelei’s recovery Bob Wharton was in a peculiarly exultant mood.  Her ready forgiveness of his behavior did much to renew his faith in himself, besides doubling his devotion to her.  He did not feel that he could ever learn to love her any more than he did, for at times the strength of his passion frightened him, but her allowance for his weakness brought them into closer touch with each other and kindled in him an aching humility that craved self-sacrifice.  Dwarfing these and kindred emotions, however, was a feeling altogether new which had come with the birth of his son.  At first the baby awed and frightened Bob, it oppressed him with a sense of tremendous responsibility, but on the heels of this came a dawning pride and then an insatiable curiosity.  He began to spend a great deal of time with the infant; he studied it, he stared at it, when no one was looking he felt of the little fellow gingerly, and would have enjoyed examining it minutely had he dared.  His hands itched for it, and its weak, strangling gurgles sent indescribable thrills through him.  The easy dexterity with which the nurse handled it—­ as if the precious atom were a bundle of rags—­excited Bob’s liveliest apprehension, and at such times he hovered near by, poised upon tiptoe for fear she might drop it.  He felt that it should be borne on silken cushions while heads were bowed and backs bent rather than upon the hip or in the crook of a careless elbow.  When he ventured to voice this feeling to his wife he was offended at her amusement, and for a whole day tortured himself with the suspicion that the child’s mother did not truly love it.

To all young fathers there comes a certain readjustment of values.  To Bob, who had always led a selfish, thoughtless existence, it was at first bewildering to discover that his place at the head of his household had been usurped by another.  Heretofore he had always been of supreme domestic importance, but now the order of things was completely reversed, if not hopelessly jumbled.  First in consequence came this new person, tiny and vastly tyrannical because of its helplessness, then the nurse, an awesome person—­a sort of oracle and regent combined—­who ruled in the name and stead of the new heir.  Nurse’s wisdom was unbounded, her lightest wish was law, and next to her in authority was a fat, bearded prime minister who daily came and went in an automobile and who wrote edicts on a little pad.  This person’s frown threw the entire establishment into confusion.  Lorelei herself occupied no mean station in the new scheme, for at least she shared the confidence of the nurse and the doctor, and ranked above the cook and the housemaid, but not so Bob.  Somewhere at the foot of the list he found his own true place.