nto a church, feeling a fool. The nurse,
miraculously white and starched, stood like a sentinel at the foot of
the bed of mystery.

'All serene, May?' he questioned. If he had attempted to say another
word he would have cried.

The pale mother nodded with a fatigued smile, and by a scarcely
perceptible gesture drew his attention to a bundle. From the next flat
came a faint, familiar sound, insolently joyous.

'Yes,' he thought, 'but if they had both been lying dead here that tune
would have been the same.'

Two months later he left the office early, telling his secretary that he
had a headache. It was a mere fibbing excuse. He suffered from sudden
fits of anxiety about his wife and child. When he reached the flat, he
found no one at home but the cook.

'Where's your mistress?' he demanded.

'She's out in the park with baby and nurse, sir.'

'But it's going to rain,' he cried angrily. 'It is raining. They'll get
wet through.'

He rushed into the corridor, and met the procession--May, the
perambulator, and the nursemaid.

'Only fancy, Ted!' May exclaimed, 'the perambulator will go into the
lift, after all. Aren't you glad?'

'Yes,' he said. 'But you're wet, surely?'

'Not a drop. We just got in in time.'

'Sure?'

'Quite.'

The tableau of May, elegant as ever, but her eyes brighter and her body
more leniently curved, of the hooded perambulator, and of the
fluffy-white nursemaid behind--it was too much for him. Touching
clumsily the apron of the perambulator, the stockbroker turned into his
doorway. Just then the girl from the next flat came out into the
corridor, dressed for social rites of the afternoon. The perambulator
was her excuse for stopping.

'What a pretty boy!' she exclaimed in ecstasy, trying to squeeze her
picture hat under the hood of the perambulator.

'Do you really think so?' said the mother, enchanted.

'Of course! The darling! How I envy you!'

May wanted to reciprocate this politeness.

'I can't tell you,' she said, 'how I envy you your piano-playing.
There's one piece----'

'Envy me! Why! It's only a pianola we've got!'

'Isn't he the picture of his granddad?' said May to Edward when they
bent over the cot that night before retiring.

And as she said it there was such candour in her voice, such content in
her smiling and courageous eyes, that Edward could not fail to
comprehend her message to him. Down in some very secret part of his soul
he felt for the first time the r