e roof did not
cover them both! and didn't she belong to him and no one else in the
world?--"Was he going to be a cross boy, then, and make his little
girl's life miserable with big, ugly frowns?..."

The doctor gave the child a brief examination as he and Joyce leant over
the crib, shoulder to shoulder. She seemed so unconscious of the close
contact and of its effect on the average masculine nature that he
mentally decided she was either a simpleton or a practised flirt, given
to playing with fire.

"I shall sleep so much better tonight now that I know there is nothing
seriously wrong with my precious darling!" she said, returning beside
him to the drawing-room and tantalising him with brief glances from her
shy, sweet eyes.

"You worry quite unnecessarily, take it from me," he returned. "Don't
put him in a glass case, and he will do all right. You should go out
more."

"I shall, when Ray comes back. He has the car."

"Play tennis every afternoon at the Club."

"I daren't! I play so badly," she pouted.

"Then come driving with me," he said on an impulse which he regretted
the moment after, for it would deprive him of the scant leisure he
usually devoted to a treatise he was writing. It was not his habit to
sacrifice himself to strangers and people in whom he was not greatly
interested. However, the study of the little spoiled beauty might prove
entertaining since she was not as transparent as he had imagined. The
mystery of her undeveloped nature, her childish outlook on life, her
ingenuousness and coquetry, were all somewhat unusual and appealing. He
could not quite gauge her feeling for her husband who worshipped the
ground she trod on. She probably took him for granted as she took the
solar system, and was not above practising her arts innocently on others
to relieve the monotony of her days. Like most pretty women, he judged
her fully aware of her prettiness, and not bound by too rigid a sense of
propriety. It might amuse him to test how far she would permit herself
to go--or the men who admired her physical beauty; and as he had no
friendship for her husband, he was not troubled by too many qualms on
Meredith's account. With a big score to settle against Life, he
considered himself at liberty to choose the nature of his compensation,
and so be even with Fate.

"I should dearly love to drive with you," Joyce said engagingly,
thinking of his perfect little car and the triumph it would be to tame
this unso