we
two were just starting out.

* * * * *

When at last we came back home this feeling took a deeper turn. I
noticed a change in Eleanore. She had far less thought and time for me
now, she seemed to be strangely absorbed in herself. Nearly all her time
and strength were given to our small apartment, in the same building as
that of her father. By countless feminine touches she was making it look
like the home she had planned. She was getting all in order. And then
one night she told me why. Her arms were close around me and her voice
was so low I could barely hear:

"There's going to be another soon--another one _of us_--do you hear?--a
very tiny blessed one."

I held her slowly tighter.

"Oh, my darling girl," I whispered.

Suddenly I relaxed my hold, for I was afraid of hurting her now. In a
moment all was so utterly changed. And as in that brave, quiet way of
hers she looked smiling steadily into my eyes, my throat contracted
sharply. For into my mind leaped the memory of what the harbor had shown
to me on that sultry hideous summer night in the tenement over in
Brooklyn. And _that_ must happen to _my wife_!

"Oh, my dear," she whispered, "if you only knew how much strength I
stored up way over there in the mountains."

So she had been thinking of this even then, and yet had told me nothing!

Here was the beginning of a long anxious period. Month after month I
watched her quietly preparing. Slowly we drew into ourselves, while her
father and mine and Sue and our friends came and went, but mattered
little. I wondered if Dillon ever felt this. As he came down to us in
the evenings from the apartment upstairs, where he and Eleanore had
meant so much to each other only a year before, he gave no sign that he
saw any change. But one night after he had gone, Eleanore happened to
pick up the evening paper which had dropped from his bulging overcoat
pocket.

"Billy, come here," she said presently.

"What is it?"

"Look at this."

The President of the United States had gone with Eleanore's father that
day in a revenue cutter over the harbor and had spoken of Dillon's great
dream in vigorous terms of approval.

"And father was here this evening," said Eleanore very slowly, "and yet
he never told me a word. He saw that I'd heard nothing and he thought I
didn't care. Oh, Billy, I feel so ashamed."

But she soon forgot the incident.

My suspense grew sharp as the time drew near.