lt would have been. I let it go by default--I made no conditions
all I wanted was to keep Paul, and never to let him hear a word against
his mother!"

Mr. Spragg received this passionate appeal in a silence that implied not
so much disdain or indifference, as the total inability to deal verbally
with emotional crises. At length, he said, a slight unsteadiness in his
usually calm tones: "I presume at the time it was optional with you to
demand Paul's custody."

"Oh, yes--it was optional," Ralph sneered.

Mr. Spragg looked at him compassionately. "I'm sorry you didn't do it,"
he said.

XXXIII

The upshot of Ralph's visit was that Mr. Spragg, after considerable
deliberation, agreed, pending farther negotiations between the opposing
lawyers, to undertake that no attempt should be made to remove Paul from
his father's custody. Nevertheless, he seemed to think it quite natural
that Undine, on the point of making a marriage which would put it in her
power to give her child a suitable home, should assert her claim on him.
It was more disconcerting to Ralph to learn that Mrs. Spragg, for once
departing from her attitude of passive impartiality, had eagerly abetted
her daughter's move; he had somehow felt that Undine's desertion of the
child had established a kind of mute understanding between himself and
his mother-in-law.

"I thought Mrs. Spragg would know there's no earthly use trying to take
Paul from me," he said with a desperate awkwardness of entreaty, and Mr.
Spragg startled him by replying: "I presume his grandma thinks he'll
belong to her more if we keep him in the family."

Ralph, abruptly awakened from his dream of recovered peace, found
himself confronted on every side by. indifference or hostility: it was
as though the June fields in which his boy was playing had suddenly
opened to engulph him. Mrs. Marvell's fears and tremors were almost
harder to bear than the Spraggs' antagonism; and for the next few days
Ralph wandered about miserably, dreading some fresh communication from
Undine's lawyers, yet racked by the strain of hearing nothing more from
them. Mr. Spragg had agreed to cable his daughter asking her to await a
letter before enforcing her demands; but on the fourth day after
Ralph's visit to the Malibran a telephone message summoned him to his
father-in-law's office.

Half an hour later their talk was over and he stood once more on the
landing outside Mr. Spragg's door. Undine's answer had come