weetmeat and with a little cry
would hold up a sticky finger and thumb.

"Look," she would say, puckering up her face.

And to save from soilure the dainty fabric she was working at, I would
rise and wipe her fingers with my handkerchief; whereupon she would
coo out the sweetest "thank you," in the world, and perhaps hold up a
diminutive garment.

"Isn't it pretty?"

"Yes, my dear," I would say, and I would turn aside wondering at the
exquisite refinements of pain that men were sometimes called upon to
bear.

At last the time came. I sat up all night in a torture of suspense,
having got it into my foolish head that Carlotta might die. The doctor
came upon me at six in the morning sitting half frozen at the bottom of
the stairs. When he gave me his cheery news he seemed to develop from a
middle-aged, commonplace man into a radiant archangel.

I met Antoinette soon afterwards, busy, important, exultant. She
nevertheless graciously accorded me a brief interview.

"And to think, Monsieur," she exclaimed, as if the crowning triumph of a
million ions of evolution had at, last been attained, "to think that it
is a boy!"

"You would have been just as pleased if it had been a girl," said I.

She shook her wise, fat head. "Women _ca ne vaut pas grand' chose._"

Let it be remembered that "women are of no great account" is a sentiment
expressed, not by me, but by Antoinette. But all the same I soon found
myself a cipher in the house, where the triumvirate of the negligible
sex, Antoinette, the nurse and Carlotta, reigned despotically.

To write much of Carlotta's happiness would be to treat of sacred things
at which I can only guess. She dwelt in rapture. The joy and meaning of
the universe were concentrated in the tiny bundle of pink flesh that lay
on her bosom. I used to sit by her side while she talked unwearyingly of
him. He was a thing of infinite perfections. He had such a lot of hair.

"She won't believe, sir," said the nurse, "that it will all drop off and
a new crop come."

"Oh-h!" said Carlotta. "It can't be so cruel. For it is my hair--see,
Seer Marcous, darling; isn't it just my hair?"

It was her great solicitude that the boy should resemble her.

"I don't know about his nose," she remarked critically. "There is so
little of it yet and it is so soft--feel how soft it is. But his eyes
are brown like mine, and his mouth--now look, aren't they just the
same?"

She put her cheek next to the child's an