ge in her early life had never blasted the
happiness of both. He would die, and it would have made him so happy to
know it. Was she right in keeping it back now? Had she ever been right?

But if she told him now, the shock of the news might hasten his
collapse. Sudden news need not be bad to cause sudden death. And, maybe
the story would be too strange for him to grasp. Better be silent. But
oh! if he might have shared her happiness!

Drowsiness was upon her before she knew it. Better perhaps sleep a
little now, while he was sleeping. She looked in at him, and spoke to
the nurse. He lay there like a lifeless waxwork--blown through, like
an apparatus out of order, to simulate breath, and doing it badly.
How could he sleep when now and then it jerked him so? He could, and
she left him and lay down, and went suddenly to sleep. After a time
that was a journey through a desert, without landmarks, she was as
suddenly waked.

"What?... I thought you spoke...." And so some one had spoken, but
not to her. She started up, and went to where the nurse was conversing
through the open window with an inarticulate person in the street
below, behind the thick window-curtain she had kept overlapped, to
check the freezing air.

"What is it?"

"It's a boy. I can't make out what he says."

"Let me come!" But Rosalind gets no nearer his meaning. She ends up
with, "I'll come down," and goes. The nurse closes the window and goes
back to the bedroom.

The street door opens easily, the Chubb lock being the only fastening.
The moment Rosalind sees the boy near she recognises him. There is no
doubt about the presumptuous expression, or the cause of it. Also the
ostentatious absence of the front tooth, clearly accounting for
inaudibility at a distance.

"What do you want?" asks Rosalind.

"Nothin' at all for myself. I come gratis, I did. There's a many
wouldn't." He is not too audible, even now; but he would be better
if he did not suck the cross-rail of the area paling.

"Why did you come?"

"To bring you the nooze. The old bloke's a friend of yours, missis.
Or p'r'aps he ain't! I can mizzle, you know, and no harm done."

"Oh no, don't mizzle on any account. Tell me about the old bloke.
Do you mean Major Roper?"

"Supposin' I do, why shouldn't I?" This singular boy seems to have
no way of communicating with his species except through defiances
and refutations. Rosalind accepts his question as an ordinary assent,
and does not make