t across the Heath; and Marie,
undressing, went to her bed, too. How still it was! The tiny breaths
of the baby scarce stirred the immediate air.

Where would Osborn be now?

CHAPTER XVIII

INTRIGUE

Osborn passed that first night at the best hotel in Liverpool. The
term "expenses" provided for the best, in reason, of everything; and a
good man at his job need not be afraid of making claims. Osborn was
going to be a very good man at his job and, somehow, without any undue
swelling of the head, he knew it. His chance had come, the big chance
which had laid poor Woodall low, and sent him up, up, rejoicing. When
they carried his rather goodlooking luggage--which he had bought new
for his honeymoon--into a palatial bedroom of the Liverpool hotel, he
experienced, only with a thousand degrees more conviction, that sense
of freedom from care which his wife was even then timidly grasping,
far away in London. He was provided for handsomely and agreeably for
three hundred and sixty-five days.

All his liabilities were provided for, too. No unexpected call could
come to him, no fingers delve into the purse that he might now keep
privately to himself. He was going out into a big world where life had
never taken him before, and he was going untrammeled; strong, young.

Osborn dressed for dinner that evening; he wore the links his
mother-in-law had given him as a wedding present, and a shirt
whose laundering had been paid for out of that omnipresent
thirty-two-and-sixpence, and the jacket cut by the tailor whom he had
never been able to afford since. He looked a very nice young man,
fresh, broad and spruce, but not too spruce; open-browed, clear-eyed
and keen. He was now at the zenith of his physical strength, in his
thirty-second year, untired and still eager. As he dressed, he looked
at himself in the glass as a man regards himself upon his wedding day.

He had remembered to find out about mails from Cook's and, before
going in to dinner, sat down in a great lounge and scribbled a note to
his wife; just this information, love, and a further injunction to
take care of herself; and no more. Like other husbands who had been
similarly placed domestically, he had no idea how this process of
taking care was to be accomplished by a harassed and busy woman, but
it was some satisfaction to express a verdant hope that it should be
done.

He went in, duty done, to an aldermanic dinner. He passed a very
successful evening. A