. She
interviewed the doctor herself, arranged for the isolation of the two
flushed and cross little girls, saw to the toys and amusements which she
discovered had become a little flattened and disused by the servants'
imperatives of tidying up and putting away, and spent the greater part
of the next two days between the night and day nurseries.

She was a little surprised to find how readily she did this and how
easily the once entirely authoritative Mrs. Harblow submitted. It was
much the same surprise that growing young people feel when they reach
some shelf that has hitherto been inaccessible. The crisis soon passed.
At his first visit the doctor was a little doubtful whether the Harman
nursery wasn't under the sway of measles, which were then raging in a
particularly virulent form in London; the next day he inclined to the
view that the trouble was merely a feverish cold, and before night this
second view was justified by the disappearance of the "temperatures" and
a complete return to normal conditions.

But as for that hushed reconciliation in the fevered presence of the
almost sacrificial offspring, it didn't happen. Sir Isaac merely thrust
aside the stiff silences behind which he masked his rage to remark:
"This is what happens when wimmen go gadding about!"

That much and glaring eyes and compressed lips and emphasizing fingers
and then he had gone again.

Indeed rather than healing their widening breach this crisis did much to
spread it into strange new regions. It brought Lady Harman to the very
verge of realizing how much of instinct and how much of duty held her
the servant of the children she had brought into the world, and how
little there mingled with that any of those factors of pride and
admiration that go to the making of heroic maternal love. She knew what
is expected of a mother, the exalted and lyrical devotion, and it was
with something approaching terror that she perceived that certain things
in these children of hers she _hated_. It was her business she knew to
love them blindly; she lay awake at night in infinite dismay realizing
she did nothing of the sort. Their weakness held her more than anything
else, the invincible pathos of their little limbs in discomfort so that
she was ready to die she felt to give them ease. But so she would have
been held, she was assured, by the little children of anybody if they
had fallen with sufficient helplessness into her care.

Just how much she didn't