Katharine, walking the floor of her own room, that night, forgot the holy calm born of the Universal Mind and its optimistic tenets, and by slow degrees lashed herself into a scientific replica of a nervous tantrum. Described in unscientific language, she was a mere shaking bundle of injured and angry egotism. In the language of her creed, she was a suffering, striving martyr. Her martyrdom, moreover, led her to order breakfast served to her in her own room. It also led her to eat hungrily, in the intervals of making her toilet for the train. She was already hatted and gloved, when Brenton discovered her intention. "You are not going out, Katharine?" he asked, with the curious lack of tact which all men show at times. "I am." "But--the baby?" "Baby is better. I have just been in to see him," she replied, as she buttoned her coat, and then flicked a grain of dust from its sleeve. Brenton shut his lips for just a minute. Then,-- "Katharine," he said very gravely; "you must have seen that the baby is only just alive." Katharine's glance was resting anxiously upon a drop or two of water on the fingers of her glove. She seemed not to have heard her husband's words. He repeated them. "Katharine, can't you see that our baby, our little boy, is going fast?" Katharine looked up. "Nonsense, Scott!" she said, with perfect calm. "The baby is as well as he was, last night. If he is so desperately ill, the nurse wouldn't have gone away and left him all alone, as I found him. The nurse knows what she is about; that is," swiftly she corrected herself; "she would, if Doctor Keltridge would let her alone. If anything does happen to the child, it will be through you." "Through me?" Brenton whitened. "Yes," Katharine answered, reckless of her husband's hurt, reckless, too, of the probable state of his nerves, after his all-night vigil. "I could have cured baby, if you had kept out of it. Your doctors' poisons have done harm enough; but your fears, your distrust, have been the final touch. If you had let me alone, I could have saved him. Even now, it may not be too late." She turned, her chin in the air and her eyes bright with anger, although about her lips there lurked a little smile of pleasure in what seemed to her her own excessive self-control. Brenton's self-control, though, was the greater. However much his voice might shake, the hand he laid upon her arm was singularly steady. "Katharine, my dear wife," he said; "I must beg you not to go away from the house just now." "Why not?" Katharine's voice was metallic in its hardness. "I am afraid you will be sorry for ever, if you do. The baby--" She shook his hand away. "It is for the baby I am going, Scott. Here and alone, I am powerless to counteract the harm you do. I must have help." "What help?" he asked her hoarsely, while his eyes, almost unseeingly, were busy with a thin trickle of water that clung to the front breadths of her pale-brown gown.