rt to regain Maurice's love; spasmodic, because when she
had visions--hideous visions! of Maurice and the "other woman,"--then,
her aspirations to regain his love, which had been born in that agony of
recognized complicity in his faithlessness, would shrivel up in the
vehement flame of jealousy. To Maurice, it was a time of endurance; of
vague thoughts of Edith, but of no mental disloyalty to his wife. Its
only brightness lay in those rare visits to Medfield, when Jacky looked
at him like a worshiping puppy, and asked forty thousand questions which
he couldn't answer! They were very careful visits, made only when
Maurice was sure Eleanor would not be going to "look for a cook." He
always balanced his brief pleasure of an hour with his little boy by an
added gentleness to his wife--perhaps a bunch of violets, bought at the
florist's on Maple Street where Lily got her flower pots or her bulbs.
He was very lonely, and increasingly bothered about Jacky. ... "Lily
will let him go plumb to hell. But I put him on the toboggan! ... I'm
responsible for his existence," he used to think. And sometimes he
repeated the words he had spoken that night when he had felt the first
stir of fatherhood, "My little Jacky."

He would hardly have said he loved the child; love had come so
gradually, that he had not recognized it! Yet it had come. It had been
added to those other intimations of God, which also he had not
recognized. Personal Joy on his wedding day had been the first; and the
next had come when he looked up at the heights of Law among the stars,
and then there had been the terrifying vision of the awfulness of Life,
at Jacky's birth. Now, into his soul, arid with long untruth, came this
flooding in of Love--which in itself is Life, and Joy, and the
fulfilling of Law! Or, as he had said, once, carelessly, "Call it God."

This pursuing God, this inescapable God! was making him acutely
uncomfortable now, about Jacky. Maurice felt the discomfort, but he did
not recognize it as Salvation, or know Whose mercy sent it! He merely
did what most of us do when we suffer: he gave the credit of his pain to
the devil--not to Infinite Love. "Oh," the poor fellow thought, coming
back one day from a call at the little secret house on Maple Street,
"the devil's getting his money's worth out of me; well, I won't squeal
about _that_! But he's getting his money's worth out of my boy, too.
She's ruining him!"

He said this once when he had been rath