s family. With that baby he would come
to a fuller love of her than ever before; its advent would surely give
him what even she admitted he lacked.

She lay now, picturing it to herself and planning a cunningly-laid
deceit by which she should appear a lovely and noble figure in his eyes.
She would have a very "bad time," of course, or somehow the thing would
lose significance, and she would ask, nay implore, the doctor to promise
her, if he could only save either the child or herself, to let it be the
child. And Joe would hear of it and know that it was because he wanted a
child so much.... She might pretend to be delirious and murmur that he
wanted the child so much more than he did her.... He would be in the
room and hear her and she would pretend not to know it....

Thus Judy, luxuriating in the darkness, knowing in her clear brain that
looked on so unswayed by her passionate weary heart, that Killigrew, for
all his instinct for children, did not want them in the concrete, that
if she bore him one he would love her just as much as he did now and no
more. That he would love her as much even while she was carrying it she
believed, and rightly, for he was too natural a man himself ever to
think nature ugly.

Judy lay imagining ... imagining ... and she thought of Nicky's firm,
soft little body, and how it had felt to her hungry hands and tried to
feel it all over again in her bed and imagine it belonged to her and
Joe. And she saw the cold, pale dawn come in, and her dream shivered and
fled before it, and she was left with only her bitter knowledge that it
would never happen, and if it did, not that way. And she wished with a
futile frenzy of longing that she had never chosen to keep Killigrew by
giving him her whole self in fee, but by refusing herself to him had
been able to leave him and live down the hold he had on her soul and
mind which had grown to such strength in those first three years. Her
first fear when she gave him everything had been lest attainment should
dull even that want he had of her, but she found he had spoken truth
when he said that that was a quality which grew with having. For fewer
men are bored with satiety than kept by a custom that becomes necessity,
and his habit for her would in itself be an attraction for him. But
Killigrew, for all his cleverness, was not the man to know, if any could
have, how passionate her withholding had been, how passionless was her
surrender.

CHAPTER X