can't alter Nature, my dear boy. But I'll tell you for your
comfort--in all my experience I've never known a woman have an easier
time."

"D'you mean--d'you mean--she'll get over it?"

"Get over it? She's got over it already. She's as strong as a horse."

He turned from Ranny with a swing of his coat tails that but feebly
expressed his decision and his impatience. He paused before the closed
doorway for a final word.

"There's no earthly reason why she shouldn't nurse that baby."

"What's that, sir?" said Ranny, arrested.

"She _must_ nurse it. It's better for her. It's better for the child. If
I were her husband I'd insist on it--_insist_. If she tells you she
can't do it, don't believe her."

"I say, I didn't know there'd been any trouble of that sort."

"That's all the trouble there's been," the doctor said. And he entered
on a brief and popular exposition of the subject, from which Ranny
gathered that Violet was flying in the face of that Providence that
Nature was. Superbly and exceptionally endowed and fitted for her end,
Violet had refused the task of nursing-mother.

"Why?"

The doctor shrugged his shoulders, implying that anything so abstruse as
young Mrs. Ransome's reasons was beyond him.

He left Ranny struggling with the question: If it isn't weakness--_what_
is it?

* * * * *

For Violet persisted in her strange refusal, in spite of Ranny's
remonstrances, his entreaties, his appeals.

"It's been trouble enough," she said, "without that."

She was sitting up in her chair before the bedroom fire. They were
alone. The nurse was downstairs at her supper. The Baby lay between them
in its cradle, wrapped in a white shawl. Ranny was watching it.

"I should have thought," he said, at last, "you couldn't have borne to
let the little thing--"

But she cut that short. "Little thing! It's all very well for _you_. You
haven't been through what I have; if you had, p'raps you'd feel as I
do."

The Baby stirred in its shawl. Its eyes were still shut, but its lips
began to curl open with a queer waving, writhing movement.

"What does it mean," said Ranny, "when it makes that funny face?"

"How should _I_ know?" said Violet.

Little sounds, utterly helpless and inarticulate, came now from the
cradle.

"What nice noises it makes," said Ranny. He was stooping by the cradle,
touching the Baby's soft cheek with his finger.

"Look at it," he said.

But Violet would n