them.

Then, as her fingers brushed the small white back, there surged up in
her a sudden virile tenderness and comprehension. She looked at Laura
with Prothero's eyes, she touched her almost with Prothero's touch.
There was, after all, some advantage in being made so very like a man,
since it compelled her to take Prothero's view of a little woman in a
mouse-coloured velvet gown.

The gown was fastened, and the Kiddy in an innocent vanity was looking
over her left shoulder and admiring her mouse-coloured tail. Of a sudden
she caught sight of Nina's eyes in the glass regarding her sombrely. She
turned and put up her face to Nina's, and paused, wavering. She closed
her eyes and felt Nina's arms about her neck, and Nina's hands touching
her hair with a subtle, quick caress, charged with confession. Laura's
nerves divined it. She opened her eyes and looked at Nina.

"Ah," she cried, "try not to hate me."

[Illustration: "Ah," she cried, "try not to hate me!"]

Nina bowed her head. "Poor Kiddy, dear Kiddy," she whispered. "How could
I?"

How could she?

She couldn't, even if she tried; not even afterwards, when she sat alone
in that room of hers that reminded her so intolerably of Prothero.
To-night it reminded her still more intolerably of her dreadful self.
She had been afraid to enter it lest it should put her to the torture.
It was the place where her beast had gone out and in with her. It still
crouched in the corner where she had kicked it. It was an unhappy beast,
but it was not cruel any more. It could have crawled to Laura's feet and
licked them.

For the Kiddy was such a little thing. It was impossible to feel hatred
for anything so soft and so unintentionally sweet and small. Life had
been cruel enough to Laura, before Owen married her. If it came to
suffering, it was not conceivable that she should have been allowed to
suffer more.

Nina put it to herself, beast or no beast, if she had had the power to
take Owen from the Kiddy, to make the Kiddy suffer as she had suffered,
could she have done it? Could she have borne to be, really, such a beast
as that? Even if the choice had lain, innocently, between her own
torture and the Kiddy's, could she have endured to see the little tender
thing stretched out, in her place, on the rack? Of course she couldn't.

And since she felt like that about it, beast or no beast, wouldn't even
Owen say that she was not so dreadful after all?

She remembered then that,