oss-purposes. You'd be tired out all the time--you're
that pretty much as it is lately, we'd have to stop having people in;
you'd be bored and I'd be worried. When you start living on a certain
scale, everything about your life has to be done on that scale. Next
October, as I said, when the lease on this house runs out, we can
manage, perhaps, to change the scale a little. There you are! Now do
stop worrying about it and let's go to bed."

But she sat there just as she was, staring at the dying fire, her hands
lying slack in her lap, all as if she hadn't heard. The long silence
irked him. He pulled out his watch, looked at it and began winding it.
He mended the fire so that it would be safe for the night; bolted a
window. Every minute or two, he stole a look at her, but she was always
just the same. Except for the faint rise and fall of her bosom, she
might have been a picture, not a woman.

At last he said again, "Come along, Rose, dear."

"It'll be too late in October," she said. "That's why I wanted to decide
things to-night. Because we must begin right away." Then she looked up
into his face. "It will be too late in October," she repeated, "unless
we begin now."

The deep tense seriousness of her voice and her look arrested his full
attention.

"Why?" he asked. And then, "Rose, what do you mean?"

"We're going to have a baby in October," she said.

He stared at her for a minute without a word, then drew in a deep breath
and pressed his hands against his eyes. All he could say at first was
just her name. But he dropped down beside her and got her in his arms.

"So that's it," he said raggedly at last. "Oh, Rose, darling, it's such
a relief! I've been so terrified about you--so afraid something had gone
wrong. And you wouldn't let me ask, and you seemed so unhappy. I'd even
thought of talking to Randolph. I might have guessed, I suppose. I've
been stupid about it. But, you darling, I understand it all now."

She didn't see just what he meant by that, but she didn't care. It was
such a wonderful thing to stop fighting and let the tension relax,
cuddle close into his embrace, and know nothing in the world but the one
fact that he loved her; that their tale of golden hours wasn't
spent--was, perhaps, illimitable. She was even too drowsily happy to
think what he meant when he said a little later:

"So now you won't let anything trouble you, will you, child? And if
queer worrying ideas get into your head about t