leaped, while the gas-jets
flapped in pale lamps.

There was no starshine on the night Jenny Raeburn was born, only a
perpetual sound of leaves dancing and the footsteps of people going
home.

Mrs. Raeburn had not been very conscious of the day's calm beauty. Her
travail had been long: the reward scarcely apprehended. Already two
elder children had closed upon her the gates of youth, and she was
inclined to resent the expense of so much pain for an additional tie.
There was not much to make the great adventure of childbirth endurable.
The transitory amazement of a few relatives was a meager consolation for
the doubts and agonies of nine slow months. But the muslin curtains,
tied back with raffish pink bows, had really worried her most of all.
Something was wrong with them: their dinginess or want of symmetry
annoyed her.

With one of those rare efforts towards imaginative comprehension, which
the sight of pain arouses in dull and stolid men, her husband had
inquired, when he came back from work, whether there was anything he
could do.

"Those curtains," she had murmured.

"Don't you get worrying yourself about curtains," he had replied.
"You've got something better to do than aggravate yourself with
curtains. The curtains is all right."

Wearily she had turned her face to the sad-colored wallpaper. Wearily
she had transferred her discontent to the absence of one of the small
brass knobs at the foot of the bed.

"And that knob. You never remember to get a new one."

"Now it's knobs!" he had exclaimed, wondering at the foolishness of a
woman's mind in the shadows of coming events. "Don't you bother your
head about knobs, either. Try and get a bit of sleep or something, do."

With this exhortation, he had retired from the darkening room, to wander
round the house lighting various jets of gas, turning them down to the
faintest blue glimmer, and hoping all the while that one of his wife's
sisters would not emerge from the country at the rumor of the baby's
arrival, in order to force her advice upon a powerless household.

Edith and Alfred, his two elder children, had been carried off by the
other aunt to her residence in Barnsbury, whence in three weeks they
would be brought back to home and twilight speculations upon the arrival
of a little brother or sister. In parenthesis, he hoped it would not be
twins. They would be so difficult to explain, and the chaps in the shop
would laugh. The midwife came down to bo