"Remember," cautioned Rouquin, his hand on the door-knob, "you are to guess what it is, Mr. Bingle." "I suppose I'm to have two guesses," said Mr. Single, with a chuckle. "Certainly," said Rouquin. "Provided your first guess is wrong." Stealthily the group entered the bedroom of Monsieur Rouquin. The window shades were down. The room was quite dark. On the bed was a dimly distinguishable heap. "Sh!" whispered Madame Rousseau, putting a finger to her lips--which in the light of the sun were singularly red and unstarved. "Sh!" echoed her husband. "Sh!" said Rouquin. On tip-toe they all advanced upon the heap, now resolved into a pile of pink blankets. Mr. Bingle leaned far over the heap. Then he put on his spectacles. "Where is it?" he whispered. "Mon dieu!" gulped the young mother, in consternation. She whipped the blankets off the bed. There was no baby. A second later she darted through a door on the opposite side of the room, slamming it violently behind her. Monsieur Rousseau started to laugh but cut it short and sputtered Mon dieu three or four times in a choked voice. "What does all this mean?" demanded Mr. Bingle. "God bless my soul!" In the meantime, Madame Rousseau was confronting a motherly looking person in Monsieur Rouquin's bath-room, down the little hall. The motherly looking person was holding a fat, yellow-headed baby on her lap and to the mouth of the fat, yellow-headed baby was attached the business end of a half-emptied milk-bottle. The conversation was in whispered French, and of exceeding bitterness on one side. It is not necessary to repeat what was said. It is only necessary to explain that the motherly looking person was the infant's grandmother--in fact the mother of Madame Rousseau. From certain disjointed explanatory scraps that fell from the motherly person's lips it might have been divined that the baby awoke some time before the arrival of the great philanthropist, and that grandmere deemed it to be the part of wisdom to feed it thoroughly before submitting it for inspection. No one takes to a howling brat, she protested. Besides, what was she there for if not to look after the child of her ungrateful, selfish daughter who had not the slightest feeling of--But, all this time, Madame Rousseau was informing her mother that she was a meddlesome, stupid old blunderer, and that the fat was in the fire. She snatched the baby from the old lady's arms. The bottle crashed to the tile floor and painted a section of it white, its pristine hue. The infant was too surprised to cry. It maintained an open-mouthed silence even as its mother whisked out of the bath-room and brought the door to with a bang, leaving grandmere in the centre of a pool of white, still whispering shrilly that even though a wise father might by chance know his own son, a mother never could hope to know her own daughter.