concerned on her account; and she asked to see the baby.

The next instant she was sorry she had done so, for Tyson, who had
continued to be charming, went out of the room when the baby came in.

The child was laid in Mrs. Nevill Tyson's lap, and she looked at it with
a gay indifference. "Isn't he a queer thing?" said she. "He isn't pretty
a bit, so you needn't say so. Nevill calls him a boiled shrimp, and a
little rat. He is rather like a little rat--a baby rat, when it's all
pink and squirmy, you know, and its eyes just opened--they've got such
pretty bright eyes. But I'm afraid baby's eyes are more like pig's eyes.
Well, _they're_ pretty too. As he's so ugly I expect he's going to be
clever, like Nevill. They say he's like me. What do you think? Look at
his forehead. Do you think he's going to be clever?"

"It depends," said Miss Batchelor, a little maliciously. (Really, the
woman was impossible, and such a hopeless fool!) Miss Batchelor's
habitually nervous manner made her innuendoes doubly telling when they
came.

"Well--he's very small. Just feel how small he is."

Instinctively Miss Batchelor held out her hands for the child, and in
another moment he was lying across her arms, slobbering dreamily.

He was not quiet long. He stretched himself, he writhed, he made himself
limp, he made himself stiff, he threw himself backwards recklessly; and
still Miss Batchelor held him. And when he cried she held him all the
closer. She let him explore the front of her dress with his little wet
mouth and fingers. He had made a great many futile experiments of the
kind in the last two days. Of those three worlds that were his, the world
of light, the world of sleep, and the world of his mother's breast, they
had taken away the one that he liked best--the warm living world of which
he had been lord and master, that was flesh of his flesh, given to his
hands to hold, and obedient to the pressure of his lips. Since then he
had lived from feeble hope to hope; and now, when he struck upon that
hard and narrow tract of corduroy studded with comfortless buttons, he
began again his melancholy wail.

"Poor little beggar," said Mrs. Nevill Tyson, "he can't help it. He's
being weaned. Don't let him slobber over your nice dress."

Certainly he had not improved the corduroy, but Miss Batchelor did not
seem to resent it.

"Can't you nurse him?" she asked.

"No," said Mrs. Nevill Tyson.

"I don't believe it," said Miss Batchelor to