involved.

As if feeling through her reserve the gist of his thoughts, she
smiled.

"Poor old Osborn!" she said.

"You can stretch an income, and stretch it," said Osborn, "but it
isn't eternally elastic, you know."

"_Don't_ I know it!"

"Well, all I ask you to do," said Osborn, "is to remember it."

Then life went round as before, except that a great anxiety as to
meeting the weekly bills fell upon Marie. Sometimes they were a
shilling up and sometimes a shilling down. The day when the greasy
books fell through the letter-box into the hall was a day to add a
grey hair to the brightest head.

With two babies to dress, she rose earlier; she swept and dusted and
cooked quicker; she sent Osborn off to his work as punctually as
before; she wheeled two infants instead of one out in the grey
perambulator to the open-air market. And there her bargaining became
sharp, thin and shrewish. She fought the merchants smartly, and
sometimes she won and sometimes they. During the day Grannie Amber
usually came in and lent a hand about the babies' bedtime. At 6.30
Osborn came home, a little peevish until after dinner. After dinner he
went out again if the new baby cried or if anything went wrong. Once a
quarter the demand for the rent came upon him like a fresh blow; once
a month he paid the furniture instalment; once a week he gave up, like
life-blood, thirty-two and sixpence to her whose palm was always
ready.

"It's a gay life!" he often said with a twisted smile, "A gay life,
what?"

CHAPTER XV

SURRENDER

Grannie Amber was afraid--she did not know exactly why--that, the year
following the second baby's arrival, Osborn would forget Marie's
birthday, and she was anxious that it should not be forgotten. Though
she herself had, early in her married life, grown tired and quiet, had
early learned to bargain shrewishly with the merchants of the cheaper
foods and, after the first three years, had always had her birthdays
forgotten; though she had been perfectly willing and ready to urge her
daughter into the life domestic, upon a small income, yet regrets took
her and sighs, all of perfect resignation, when she saw the darkness
under Marie's eyes, when she stood by in the market and heard her hard
chaffering, when she noted the worried crinkles come to stay in her
brow. So that, resolving that Osborn should not forget, natural as it
would have been for him, in her judgment, to do so, she trailed his
wife's birthda