reason why I wished for light passages in what he read to us was that they would have been cues for Mary’s laugh. This was a thing always new to me. I never tired of that little bell-like euphony; those funny little lucid and level trills. There was no stint of that charm when William was not reading to us. Mary was in no awe of him, apart from his work, and in no awe at all of me: she used to laugh at us both, for one thing and another--just the same laugh as I had first heard when William tried to unharness the pony. I cultivated in myself whatever amused her in me; I drew out whatever amused her in William; I never let slip any of the things that amused her in herself. ‘Chaff’ is a great bond; and I should have enjoyed our bouts of it even without Mary’s own special obbligato. She used to call me (for I was very urban in those days) the Gentleman from London. I used to call her the Brave Little Woman. Whatever either of us said or did could be twisted easily into relation to those two titles; and our bouts, to which William listened with a puzzled, benevolent smile, used to cease only because Mary regarded me as a possible purveyor of what William, she was sure, wanted and needed, down there in the country, alone with her: intellectual conversation, after his work. She often, I think, invented duties in garden or kitchen so that he should have this stimulus, or luxury, without hindrance. But when William was alone with me it was about her that he liked to talk, and that I myself liked to talk too. He was very sound on the subject of Mary; and so was I. And if, when I was alone with Mary, I seemed to be sounder than I was on the subject of William’s wonderfulness, who shall blame me? Had Mary been a mother, William’s wonderfulness would have been less greatly important. But he was her child as well as her lover. And I think, though I do not know, she believed herself content that this should always be, if so it were destined. It was not destined so. On the first night of a visit I paid them in April, 1899, William, when we were alone, told me news. I had been vaguely conscious, throughout the evening, of some change; conscious that Mary had grown gayer, and less gay--somehow different, somehow remote. William said that her child would be born in September, if all went well. ‘She’s immensely happy,’ he told me. I realised that she was indeed happier than ever... ‘And of course it would be a wonderful thing, for both of us,’ he said presently, ‘to have a son--or a daughter.’ I asked him which he would rather it were, a son or a daughter. ‘Oh, either,’ he answered wearily. It was evident that he had misgivings and fears. I tried to reason him out of them. He did not, I am thankful to say, ever let Mary suspect them. She had no misgivings. But it was destined that her child should live only for an hour, and that she should die in bearing it.