“You must go in alone! No man can be your refuge from your husband! Here!” He released himself, and, kissing the warm little face of the sleeping child, he pressed it into her arms. His fingers touched hers under the shawl; he tore his hand away with a shiver. She stood a moment looking at the closed door; then she flung it open, and, pausing as if to gather her strength, vanished into the brightness within. He turned, and ran crookedly down the street, wavering from side to side in his lameness, and flinging up his arms to save himself from falling as he ran, with a gesture that was like a wild and hopeless appeal. XXXIV. Marcia pushed into the room where she had left Bartley. She had no escape from her fate; she must meet it, whatever it was. The room was empty, and she began doggedly to search the house for him, up stairs and down, carrying the child with her. She would not have been afraid now to call him; but she had no voice, and she could not ask the servant anything when she looked into the kitchen. She saw the traces of the meal he had made in the dining-room, and when she went a second time to their chamber to lay the little girl down in her crib, she saw the drawers pulled open, and the things as he had tossed them about in packing his bag. She looked at the clock on the mantel--an extravagance of Bartley's, for which she had scolded him--and it was only half past eight; she had thought it must be midnight. She sat all night in a chair beside the bed; in the morning she drowsed and dreamed that she was weeping on Bartley's shoulder, and he was joking her and trying to comfort her, as he used to do when they were first married; but it was the little girl, sitting up in her crib, and crying loudly for her breakfast. She put on the child a pretty frock that Bartley liked, and when she had dressed her own tumbled hair she went down stairs, feigning to herself that they should find him in the parlor. The servant was setting the table for breakfast, and the little one ran forward: “Baby's chair; mamma's chair; papa's chair!” “Yes,” answered Marcia, so that the servant might hear too. “Papa will soon be home.” She persuaded herself that he had gone as before for the night, and in this pretence she talked with the child at the table, and she put aside some of the breakfast to be kept warm for Bartley. “I don't know just when he may be in,” she explained to the girl. The utterance of her pretence that she expected him encouraged her, and she went about her work almost cheerfully. At dinner she said, “Mr. Hubbard must have been called away, somewhere. We must get his dinner for him when he comes: the things dry up so in the oven.”