been for Travers.
Travers would be as impervious to handling as a battery mule. She really
wouldn't be able to do anything with Travers. He looked as if he drank;
but he didn't.

Of course having a baby was simply horrid; lots of women got out of it
nowadays who were quite happily married.

It was disgusting of Winn to suggest it when he didn't even love her.

But once she had one, if she really did give way, a good deal might be
done with it.

Maternity was sacred; being a wife on the other hand was "forever
climbing up the climbing wave," there was nothing final about it as
there was in being able to say, "I am the mother of your child!"

Her wistful blue eyes expanded. She saw her own way spreading out before
her like a promised land. "I can't," she said touchingly, "decide all
this in a minute."

He could stay on for two years at the War Office, and Estelle meant him
to stay without inconvenience to herself. He tried bargaining with her;
but her idea of a bargain was one-sided.

"I sometimes feel as if you kept me out of everything," she said at
last.

Estelle was feeling her way; she thought she might collect a few extras
to add to her side of the bargain.

Apparently she was right. Winn was all eagerness to meet her. "How do
you mean?" he asked anxiously.

"Oh," she said contemplatively, "such heaps of things! One thing, I
don't expect you've ever noticed that you never ask your friends to stay
here. I've had all mine; you've never even asked your mother! It's as if
you were ashamed of me."

"I'll ask her like a shot if you like," he said eagerly. Estelle was not
anxious for a visit from Lady Staines, but she thought it sounded better
to begin with her. She let her pass.

"It's not only your relations," she went on; "it's your friends. What
must they think of a wife they are never allowed to see?"

"But they're such a bachelor crew," he objected. "It never occurred to
me you'd care for them--just ordinary soldier chaps like me, not a bit
clever or amusing."

Estelle did not say that crews of bachelors are seldom out of place in
the drawing-room of a young and pretty woman. She looked past her
husband to where in fancy she beheld the aisle of a church and the young
Adonis, who had been his best man, with eyes full of reverence and awe
gazing at her approaching figure.

"I thought," she said indifferently, "you liked that man you insisted on
having instead of Lord Arlington at the wedding?"

"