easoned fingers, which
by hard manual labour had kept herself and him in the young days of
his humble obscurity, and which during sixty years had not been idle
for more than six weeks in all, he grew almost apologetic for his
wealth.

They reminded him of the day when his total resources were five
pounds--won in a wager, and of the day when he drove proudly about
behind a mule collecting other people's rents, and of the glittering
days when he burst in on her from Llandudno with over a thousand
gold sovereigns in a hat-box--product of his first great picturesque
coup--imagining himself to be an English Jay Gould.

She had not blenched, even then. She had not blenched since. And she
never would blench. In spite of his gorgeous position and his unique
reputation, in spite of her well-concealed but notorious pride in
him, he still went in fear of that ageless woman, whose undaunted eye
always told him that he was still the lad Denry, and her inferior in
moral force. The curve of her thin lips seemed ever to be warning him
that with her pretensions were quite useless, and that she saw through
him and through him to the innermost grottoes of his poor human
depravity.

He caught her eye guiltily.

"Behold the Alderman!" she murmured with grimness.

That was all. But the three words took thirty years off his back,
snatched the half-crown cigar out of his hand and reduced him again to
the raw, hungry boy of Brougham Street. And he knew that he had sinned
gravely in not coming upstairs very much earlier.

"Is that you, father?" called the high voice of Robert from the back
of the screen.

He had to admit to his son that it was he.

The infant lay on his back in Maisie's bed, while his mother sat
lightly on the edge of nurse's bed near by.

"Well, you're a nice chap!" said Edward Henry, avoiding Nellie's
glance, but trying to face his son as one innocent man may face
another--and not perfectly succeeding. He never could feel like a real
father, somehow.

"My temperature's above normal," announced Robert, proudly, and then
added with regret, "but not much!"

There was the clinical thermometer--instrument which Edward Henry
despised and detested as being an inciter of illnesses--in a glass of
water on the table between the two beds.

"Father!" Robert began again.

"Well, Robert?" said Edward Henry, cheerfully. He was glad that the
child was in one of his rare loquacious moods, because the chatter not
only proved