the nurse.

III

Lethbury, at first, had resisted the idea of a legal adoption; but when
he found that his wife's curiously limited imagination prevented her
regarding the child as hers till it had been made so by process of law,
he promptly withdrew his objection. On one point only he remained
inflexible; and that was the changing of the waif's name. Mrs.
Lethbury, almost at once, had expressed a wish to rechristen it: she
fluctuated between Muriel and Gladys, deferring the moment of decision
like a lady wavering between two bonnets. But Lethbury was unyielding.
In the general surrender of his prejudices this one alone held out.

"But Jane is so dreadful," Mrs. Lethbury protested.

"Well, we don't know that _she_ won't be dreadful. She may grow up a
Jane."

His wife exclaimed reproachfully. "The nurse says she's the loveliest--"

"Don't they always say that?" asked Lethbury patiently. He was prepared
to be inexhaustibly patient now that he had reached a firm foothold of
opposition.

"It's cruel to call her Jane," Mrs. Lethbury pleaded.

"It's ridiculous to call her Muriel."

"The nurse is _sure_ she must be a lady's child."

Lethbury winced: he had tried, all along, to keep his mind off the
question of antecedents.

"Well, let her prove it," he said, with a rising sense of exasperation.
He wondered how he could ever have allowed himself to be drawn into
such a ridiculous business; for the first time he felt the full irony
of it. He had visions of coming home in the afternoon to a house
smelling of linseed and paregoric, and of being greeted by a chronic
howl as he went up stairs to dress for dinner. He had never been a
club-man, but he saw himself becoming one now.

The worst of his anticipations were unfulfilled. The baby was
surprisingly well and surprisingly quiet. Such infantile remedies as
she absorbed were not potent enough to be perceived beyond the nursery;
and when Lethbury could be induced to enter that sanctuary, there was
nothing to jar his nerves in the mild pink presence of his adopted
daughter. Jars there were, indeed: they were probably inevitable in the
disturbed routine of the household; but they occurred between Mrs.
Lethbury and the nurses, and Jane contributed to them only a placid
stare which might have served as a rebuke to the combatants.

In the reaction from his first impulse of atonement, Lethbury noted
with sharpened perceptions the effect of the change on his wife's
char