In the instant before she awoke he could see what a fragile and pitiful being a healthy and happy young wife can appear. Her pose revealed an unsuspected slender weakness of body, her face something infantile and wistful he had still to reckon with. She awoke with a start and stared at him for a moment, and at the room about her. "Oh, where have you been?" she asked almost querulously. "Where _have_ you been?" "But my dear!" he said, as one might speak to a child, "why aren't you in bed? It's just dawn." "Oh," she said, "I waited and I waited. It seemed you _must_ come. I read a book. And then I fell asleep." And then with a sob of feeble self-pity, "And here I am!" She rubbed the back of her hand into one eye and shivered. "I'm cold," she said, "and I want some tea." "Let's make some," said Trafford. "It's been horrible waiting," said Marjorie without moving; "horrible! Where have you been?" "I've been working. I got excited by my work. I've been at the laboratory. I've had the best spell of work I've ever had since our marriage." "But I have been up all night!" she cried with her face and voice softening to tears. "How _could_ you? How _could_ you?" He was surprised by her weeping. He was still more surprised by the self-abandonment that allowed her to continue. "I've been working," he repeated, and then looked about with a man's helplessness for the tea apparatus. One must have hot water and a teapot and a kettle; he would find those in the kitchen. He strolled thoughtfully out of the room, thinking out the further details of tea-making all mixed up with amazement at Marjorie, while she sat wiping her eyes with a crumpled pocket-handkerchief. Presently she followed him down with the rug about her like a shawl, and stood watching him as he lit a fire of wood and paper among the ashes in the kitchen fireplace. "It's been dreadful," she said, not offering to help. "You see," he said, on his knees, "I'd really got hold of my work at last." "But you should have sent----" "I was thinking of my work. I clean forgot." "Forgot?" "Absolutely." "Forgot--_me!_" "Of course," said Trafford, with a slightly puzzled air, "you don't see it as I do." The kettle engaged him for a time. Then he threw out a suggestion. "We'll have to have a telephone." "I couldn't imagine where you were. I thought of all sorts of things. I almost came round--but I was so horribly afraid I mightn't find you." He renewed his suggestion of a telephone. "So that if I really want you----" said Marjorie. "Or if I just want to feel you're there." "Yes," said Trafford slowly, jabbing a piece of firewood into the glow; but it was chiefly present in his mind that much of that elaborate experimenting of his wasn't at all a thing to be cut athwart by the exasperating gusts of a telephone bell clamouring for attention. Hitherto the laboratory telephone had been in the habit of disconnecting itself early in the afternoon.