hed his mere natural impulse. Marriage, he told
himself, would mean a son of his own, and the stability which he had
always missed in any relation with a woman would be secured through the
responsibility which fatherhood involved. Here was the interest his
life had lacked, after all--here was the explanation of that vacancy his
emotions had not filled; and it appeared to him that his loves had
failed in definiteness, in any vital purpose, because he had never seen
himself fulfilled in the son which he now desired.

"I shouldn't wonder if this is what I've been wanting all the time," he
thought; and the generous fervour, the ideal purity, he had never been
able to introduce into his romances, gathered luminously about the
cradle of his unborn child. It seemed to him, as he smoked his second
cigar in the face of this paternal vision, that he had stumbled by
accident upon the one secret of happiness which he had overlooked; and
it was while the beaming effulgence of this mood still lasted, that he
finished his papers, and determined to look in upon Laura on his way
down town. The memory of last evening was placed at the distance of a
thousand miles by his sudden change of humour, and it seemed as useless
to reproach himself for an act so far beyond his present area of
personality as it would have been to moralise upon an indiscretion in
ancient history. A little later, as he ascended Laura's steps, he felt
serenely assured that he had made the best possible disposition of his
future.

To his surprise she was not in her sitting-room when he entered, and it
was several minutes before she came in, very quietly and with an averted
face. When he would have taken her in his arms, she drew back quickly
with an indignant and wounded gesture. Her eyes were burning, but he had
never heard her speak in so hard a voice.

"You were in town last night," she said, and by her look more than her
words he was brought face to face with the suspicion that she was
capable of a jealous outburst.

"I wanted to come, but I couldn't," he answered, with an attempt at his
quizzical humour. "I rushed here as soon as I dared this morning--isn't
that enough to prove something?"

Again he made a movement to take her in his arms, but her face was so
unyielding that his hands, which he had outstretched, fell to his sides.
From the look in her eyes he could almost believe that she had grown to
hate him in the night; and at the thought his earlier impe