y absorbed and possessed by her treasure,
was the "horrid woman" whom his wife had indicated only a little while
ago, holding a baby--Kitty's sacred baby--in her wanton lap! The child
was feebly grasping the end of the slender jeweled necklace which the
woman held temptingly dangling from a thin white jeweled finger above
it. But its eyes were beaming with an intense delight, as if trying to
respond to the deep, concentrated love in the handsome face that was
bent above it.

At the sudden intrusion of Barker she looked up. There was a faint rise
in her color, but no loss of sell-possession.

"Please don't scold the nurse," she said, "nor say anything to Mrs.
Barker. It is all my fault. I thought that both the nurse and child
looked dreadfully bored with each other, and I borrowed the little
fellow for a while to try and amuse him. At least I haven't made
him cry, have I, dear?" The last epithet, it is needless to say,
was addressed to the little creature in her lap, but in its tender
modulation it touched the father's quick sympathies as if he had shared
it with the child. "You see," she said softly, disengaging the baby
fingers from her necklace, "that OUR sex is not the only one tempted by
jewelry and glitter."

Barker hesitated; the Madonna-like devotion of a moment ago was gone;
it was only the woman of the world who laughingly looked up at him.
Nevertheless he was touched. "Have you--ever--had a child, Mrs.
Horncastle?" he asked gently and hesitatingly. He had a vague
recollection that she passed for a widow, and in his simple eyes all
women were virgins or married saints.

"No," she said abruptly. Then she added with a laugh, "Or perhaps
I should not admire them so much. I suppose it's the same feeling
bachelors have for other people's wives. But I know you're dying to
take that boy from me. Take him, then, and don't be ashamed to carry him
yourself just because I'm here; you know you would delight to do it if I
weren't."

Barker bent over the silken lap in which the child was comfortably
nestling, and in that attitude had a faint consciousness that Mrs.
Horncastle was mischievously breathing into his curls a silent laugh.
Barker lifted his firstborn with proud skillfulness, but that sagacious
infant evidently knew when he was comfortable, and in a paroxysm of
objection caught his father's curls with one fist, while with the other
he grasped Mrs. Horncastle's brown braids and brought their heads into
contac