The pale mother nodded with a fatigued smile, and by a scarcely perceptible gesture drew his attention to a bundle. From the next flat came a faint, familiar sound, insolently joyous. 'Yes,' he thought, 'but if they had both been lying dead here that tune would have been the same.' Two months later he left the office early, telling his secretary that he had a headache. It was a mere fibbing excuse. He suffered from sudden fits of anxiety about his wife and child. When he reached the flat, he found no one at home but the cook. 'Where's your mistress?' he demanded. 'She's out in the park with baby and nurse, sir.' 'But it's going to rain,' he cried angrily. 'It is raining. They'll get wet through.' He rushed into the corridor, and met the procession--May, the perambulator, and the nursemaid. 'Only fancy, Ted!' May exclaimed, 'the perambulator will go into the lift, after all. Aren't you glad?' 'Yes,' he said. 'But you're wet, surely?' 'Not a drop. We just got in in time.' 'Sure?' 'Quite.' The tableau of May, elegant as ever, but her eyes brighter and her body more leniently curved, of the hooded perambulator, and of the fluffy-white nursemaid behind--it was too much for him. Touching clumsily the apron of the perambulator, the stockbroker turned into his doorway. Just then the girl from the next flat came out into the corridor, dressed for social rites of the afternoon. The perambulator was her excuse for stopping. 'What a pretty boy!' she exclaimed in ecstasy, trying to squeeze her picture hat under the hood of the perambulator. 'Do you really think so?' said the mother, enchanted. 'Of course! The darling! How I envy you!' May wanted to reciprocate this politeness. 'I can't tell you,' she said, 'how I envy you your piano-playing. There's one piece----' 'Envy me! Why! It's only a pianola we've got!' 'Isn't he the picture of his granddad?' said May to Edward when they bent over the cot that night before retiring. And as she said it there was such candour in her voice, such content in her smiling and courageous eyes, that Edward could not fail to comprehend her message to him. Down in some very secret part of his soul he felt for the first time the real force of the great explanatory truth that one generation succeeds another. * * * * * THE SISTERS QITA The manuscript ran thus: * * * * *