All day long over the gray Islington Street October, casting pearly mists, had turned the sun to silver and made London a city of meditation whose tumbled roofs and parapets and glancing spires appeared hushed and translucent as in a lake's tranquillity. The traffic, muted by the glory of a fine autumn day, marched, it seemed, more slowly and to a sound of heavier drums. Like mountain echoes street cries haunted the burnished air, while a muffin-man, abroad too early for the season, swung his bell intermittently with a pastoral sound. Even the milk-cart, heard in the next street, provoked the imagination of distant armor. The houses seemed to acquire from the gray and silver web of October enchantment a mysterious immensity. There was no feeling of stressful humanity even in the myriad sounds that, in a sheen of beauty, floated about the day. The sun went down behind roofs and left the sky plumed with rosy feathers. There was a cold gray minute before dusk came stealing in, richly and profoundly blue: then night sprang upon the street, and through the darkness an equinoctial wind swept, moaning. Along the gutters the brown leaves danced: the tall plane tree at the end of the street would not be motionless until December should freeze the black branches in diapery against a somber sky. Along the gutters the leaves whispered and ran and shivered and leaped, while the gas-jets flapped in pale lamps. There was no starshine on the night Jenny Raeburn was born, only a perpetual sound of leaves dancing and the footsteps of people going home. Mrs. Raeburn had not been very conscious of the day's calm beauty. Her travail had been long: the reward scarcely apprehended. Already two elder children had closed upon her the gates of youth, and she was inclined to resent the expense of so much pain for an additional tie. There was not much to make the great adventure of childbirth endurable. The transitory amazement of a few relatives was a meager consolation for the doubts and agonies of nine slow months. But the muslin curtains, tied back with raffish pink bows, had really worried her most of all. Something was wrong with them: their dinginess or want of symmetry annoyed her. With one of those rare efforts towards imaginative comprehension, which the sight of pain arouses in dull and stolid men, her husband had inquired, when he came back from work, whether there was anything he could do. "Those curtains," she had murmured. "Don't you get worrying yourself about curtains," he had replied. "You've got something better to do than aggravate yourself with curtains. The curtains is all right." Wearily she had turned her face to the sad-colored wallpaper. Wearily she had transferred her discontent to the absence of one of the small brass knobs at the foot of the bed. "And that knob. You never remember to get a new one."