ose
the house. Mary hardly left it, even to walk in the garden behind the
circling brick wall. But she sent her husband on innumerable errands
into Old Chester, and when he came back she would say, "Did you
see--_him_?"

And sometimes Johnny's father would say, "Yes."

"You didn't speak to him?" she would ask, in a panic.

"Of course not! But he's an attractive boy." Once he added, "Why don't
you go and call on Miss Lydia--and see him yourself?"

She caught her soft hands together in terror. "Go to Miss Lydia's? I?
Oh, I couldn't! Oh, Carl, don't you see--_I might like him_!"

"You couldn't help it if you saw him."

"That's just it! I don't want to like him. Nothing would induce me to
see him."

Yet there came a moment when the urge of maternity was greater than the
instinct of secrecy, greater even than the fear of awakening in herself
that "liking" which would inevitably mean pain. She and Johnny's father
were to leave Old Chester the next day; for a week she had been counting
the hours until they would start, and she could turn her back on this
gnawing temptation! But when that last day came, she vacillated: "I'll
just walk down and look at Miss Lydia's; he might be going in or coming
out. . . . No! I won't; he might see me, and think-- . . . I must--I
must. . . . Oh, I _can't_, I won't!" Yet in the late afternoon she
slipped out of the house and went stealthily down the carriage road,
and, standing in the shadow of one of the great stone gateposts, stared
over at Miss Lydia's open door. As she stood there she heard a sound.
Her heart leaped--and fell, shuddering. Just once in her life had she
felt that elemental pang; it was when another sound, the little, thin
cry of birth pierced her ears. Now the sound was of laughter, the
shrill, cracking laughter of an adolescent boy. She crept back to the
big house, so exhausted that she said to old Alfred, "Tell Mr.
Robertson that I have a headache, and am lying down."

Later, when her husband, full of concern at her discomfort, came
upstairs to sit on the edge of her bed and ask her how she felt, she
told him what had happened.

"I wouldn't see him for anything," she said, gasping; "even his voice
just about killed me! Oh, Carl, suppose I were to like him? Oh, what
shall I do?--_I don't want to like him._"

"Why, my dear, it would be all right if you did," he tried to reassure
her. "There's no reason why you shouldn't see him once in a while--and
like him, too.