is steps coming along the verandah and
clenched her hands fiercely over her mouth.

"Did you cry out then, dear?" came his voice as he pushed at the door.
Feeling an obstruction he pushed all the harder: she could not speak,
but he took in at a glance her twisted figure and as he bent over her,
shaking with fright, she caught at his hands.

"I thought I'd do it all by myself, but I can't bear it," she gasped.

"Oh my darling," he cried, lifting her in his arms and holding her
tight. "How long has this been going on?"

It was some time before she was able to speak. In the bleak aloneness of
pain she was very glad of his presence.

"All day--only I didn't want you to know," she said. He groaned.

"For fear it'd bowl me over? Oh God--"

"I'd a plot to send you away. But I'll be glad to know you're not very
far! Will you go for Mrs. Twist, Louis? It will be back in a minute."

Kissing her, he ran out across the paddock. In that moment he felt he
would cheerfully die for her; it was not her illness that made him so
tender, so unusually exalted. He had not it in his nature to regard pain
as other than interesting. But the rending thought that she had suffered
alone rather than risk his getting drunk--that jerked him. He felt he
could beat any weakness that night, as he recalled her eyes, trying to
smile at him through pain, her hands as they clung to his for help. He
lived a thousand lives during the next few hours until, at two o'clock,
he heard the heart-stopping cry of a newborn child that brought stuffy
London nights in the slums back to his mind for an instant until Mrs.
Twist said, with an air of personal pride, that it was a boy.

And then Louis cracked again; kneeling beside Marcella, who was quite
calm and very tired, he sobbed out his love and his penitence and his
stern and frantic resolves for the future, his undying intention to be
as good a man as she was until Mrs. Twist, who was not very used to
emotional young men, packed him out of the way to take the news to Mr.
Twist, who was sitting up waiting for it.

The two women had never told Mr. Twist of Louis's tragedy. He had
guessed that he had been "on the shikker" that week he stayed away, but
he took that as the ordinary thing done by ordinary men--he himself was
past "having a burst," he had no heart for it now; but no young man was
any the worse for it if it didn't take hold of him. And so, when Louis
went there with his eyes shining, his hair wild