er to
Virginia, "but I'm sleepy."

"He isn't all right," insisted Virginia obstinately. "There's something
wrong with him. I don't know what it is, but he isn't in the least like
himself."

"It's just your imagination. You've got the children on the brain,
Virginia. Don't you remember the time you woke me in the night and sent
me after Doctor Fraser because Jenny had a bad attack of the hiccoughs?"

"I know," acknowledged Virginia humbly. She could be humble enough, but
what good did that do when she was, as he told himself irritably, "as
stubborn as a mule"? Her softness--she had seemed as soft as flowers
when he married her--had been her greatest charm for him after her
beauty; and now, at the end of eight years in which she had appeared as
delightfully invertebrate as he could have desired, she revealed to his
astonished eyes a backbone that was evidently made of iron. She was
immovable, he admitted, and because she was immovable he was conscious
of a sharp unreasonable impulse to reduce her to the pliant curves of
her girlhood. After eight years of an absolute supremacy, which had been
far from good for him, his will had been tripped up at last by so small
a thing as a mere whim of Virginia's.

"You told Abby you would go," he urged, exasperated rather than soothed
by her humility. "And it's too late now for her to ask any one else."

"I'm so sorry, dear, but I never once thought about it. I've been so
worried all day."

He looked at the child, lying flushed and drowsy in Virginia's arms, and
his face hardened until a latent brutality crept out around his
handsome, but loosely moulded, lips. The truth was that Harry had never
looked healthier than he did at that instant in the firelight, and the
whole affair appeared to Oliver only another instance of what he called
Virginia's "sensational motherhood."

"Can't you see for yourself that he's perfectly well?" he asked.

"I know he looks so, dear, but he isn't."

"Well, here's your mother. Leave it to her. She will agree with me."

"Why, what is it, Jinny?" asked Mrs. Pendleton, laying her bundle on the
couch (for she had come prepared to spend the night), and regarding
Oliver with the indulgent eyes of an older generation.

"Virginia says at the last minute that she won't go with us," said
Oliver, angry, yet caressing as he always was in his manner to his
mother-in-law, to whom he was sincerely devoted. "She's got into her
head that there's something wron