"Oh, no, no!" she hastened to reassure. "I don't mind at all, really!"
Her eyes gazed up at him, limpidly clear, and emptied of self. "I have
to run up and down stairs so many times to baby now that I couldn't go,
no matter how much I was asked to. I'm only glad that you will have the
distraction--you need it. I hope you'll have a lovely time."

She listened to his descending footsteps, and after a moment or two
arose and laid the sleeping child down in his crib.

In the dim light she went about the room, picking up toys and little
discarded garments left by the children, folding the clothes away, her
tall, graceful figure, in the large curves of its repeated bending and
straightening, seeming to exemplify some unpainted Millet-like idea of
mother-work, emblematic of its unceasing round. She was hanging up a
tiny cloak in the half gloom of her closet, when she heard her husband's
step once more stealing into the room, and the next moment saw him
beside her.

"What's the matter?" she asked, with quick premonition.

"Nothing, nothing at all; we haven't started yet." He put one arm around
her and with the other lifted her face up toward his. "I only came back
to tell you"--His voice broke; there seemed to be a mist over the eyes
that were bent on hers. "I can't talk. I can't be as I ought to be,
Lois, until all this is over--but--I don't know what's getting into me
lately, you look so beautiful to me that I can't take my eyes off you! I
went around all to-day counting the hours, like a foolish boy, until it
was time to come back to you; I grudge every minute that I spend away
from my lovely wife."

Sometimes we have a happiness so much greater, so much more blessed than
our easily imagined bliss, that we can only hide our eyes from it at
first, like those of old, when in some humble and unthought-of place
they were visited by angels.

XXV

Very late that night Bailey Girard arrived at the house, after an
absence of ten days. Dosia had gone to bed unusually early, but she
could not sleep. She could not seem to sleep at all lately--the tireder
she was, the more ceaselessly luminous seemed her brain; it was like
trying to sleep in a white glare in which all sorts of trivial things
became unnaturally distinct. Darkness brought, not a sense of rest, but
that dread knowledge that she was going to lie there staring through all
the hours of it. Since that night that the pitcher had broken, she was
ever waiting tensely fo