His mind was made up now; there was nothing else for it. His face assumed an air of the deepest gravity; that was not difficult, for, indeed, his situation was grave enough. He put out his hand and laid it upon hers for a moment. “Lily,” he said, “I’ve been endeavoring to put off this blow. It was perhaps foolish, but I thought you would feel it less were you kept in ignorance than if all your hopes were cut off. Fain, fain would I bring back your baby and lay him in your arms again! You think I am a harsh man with no softness for a mother and a child, but you are mistaken, Lily. All that I am worth in this world I would give to bring him back. But there is but one hand that could do that.” She raised herself up with a start, flinging off his hand, which again had touched hers. “What do you mean? What do you mean?” she cried, with wild staring eyes, eyes that seemed to be bursting from her head. She had been leaning back on the hard sofa in her weakness. Now she sat upright, her hands raised before her as if to push off some dreadful fate. “You know what I mean, Lily,” he said, looking at her with a determined steadiness of gaze. “What is the life of an infant like that? It is like a new-lighted candle that every breath can blow out. Oh! blame me, blame me; I will not say a word. Tell me it was the night journey, the plunge into the cold, after the warm bosom of his mother. I thought it was the only thing I could do, but I will not say a word if you tell me I was to blame. Anyhow, whosever blame it was, the baby, poor little thing----” “You mean he is dead!” said Lily, with a great cry. He thought she had fainted: they all were in the way of thinking she had fainted when all her life went from her, except pain, which is the strongest life of all. Every thing was black before Lily’s eyes; her heart leaped with a wild movement and then seemed to die and become still in her breast; her lips dropped apart, as if the last breath had passed there with that cry. Ronald thought she had fainted for the first moment, and then he thought she had died. He sprang up with anguish in his heart; he had done it, braving all the risks, knowing her weakness, yet Beenie, rushing in at the sound of Lily’s cry, with all her battery of remedies, forgave him whatever he might have done at the sight of his face. “I have killed her! I have killed her!” he cried; “it is my fault!” “Oh, sir, you should mind how weak she is!” cried Beenie, bringing forth her essences, her salts, her aromatic vinegar. Their words came faintly to Lily’s brain. She struggled up again from the sofa, on which she had fallen back, beating the air with her hands, as if to find and clutch at something that would give her strength. “My baby is dead!” she cried, stumbling over the words. “My baby, my baby is dead, my baby is dead!” It seemed as if the wail had become mechanical in the completeness of her downfall and misery, body and soul.