"You don't mind my going out to-night and leaving you?" he murmured. "The doctor ought to have asked _you_, instead; you need it more than I." "Oh, no, no!" she hastened to reassure. "I don't mind at all, really!" Her eyes gazed up at him, limpidly clear, and emptied of self. "I have to run up and down stairs so many times to baby now that I couldn't go, no matter how much I was asked to. I'm only glad that you will have the distraction--you need it. I hope you'll have a lovely time." She listened to his descending footsteps, and after a moment or two arose and laid the sleeping child down in his crib. In the dim light she went about the room, picking up toys and little discarded garments left by the children, folding the clothes away, her tall, graceful figure, in the large curves of its repeated bending and straightening, seeming to exemplify some unpainted Millet-like idea of mother-work, emblematic of its unceasing round. She was hanging up a tiny cloak in the half gloom of her closet, when she heard her husband's step once more stealing into the room, and the next moment saw him beside her. "What's the matter?" she asked, with quick premonition. "Nothing, nothing at all; we haven't started yet." He put one arm around her and with the other lifted her face up toward his. "I only came back to tell you"--His voice broke; there seemed to be a mist over the eyes that were bent on hers. "I can't talk. I can't be as I ought to be, Lois, until all this is over--but--I don't know what's getting into me lately, you look so beautiful to me that I can't take my eyes off you! I went around all to-day counting the hours, like a foolish boy, until it was time to come back to you; I grudge every minute that I spend away from my lovely wife." Sometimes we have a happiness so much greater, so much more blessed than our easily imagined bliss, that we can only hide our eyes from it at first, like those of old, when in some humble and unthought-of place they were visited by angels. XXV