And he wouldn't believe it was all over when at midnight they came and told him, and when he saw Violet lying in her mortal apathy, and when he kissed her poor drawn face. He couldn't believe that Violet's face wouldn't look like that forever, that it wouldn't keep forever its dreadful memory, the resentment that smoldered still under its white apathy. * * * * * For there could be no doubt that that was Violet's attitude--resentment, as of some wrong that had been done her. He didn't wonder at it. He resented the whole business himself. It was a pity, though, that she didn't take more kindly to the baby, seeing that, after all, the poor little thing was innocent, it didn't know what it had done. Ranny would not have permitted himself this reflection but that a whole fortnight had passed and Violet had not died. Ranny's fatherhood was perturbed by Violet's indifference to the baby. He spoke of it to the doctor, and suggested weakness as a possible explanation. "Weakness?" The doctor stared at him and smiled faintly. "What weakness?" "I mean," said Ranny, "after all she's gone through." The doctor put his hand on Ranny's shoulder. "My dear boy, if half the women went through as little and came out of it as well--" Ranny flared up. "I like that--your trying to make out she didn't suffer. Tortures weren't _in_ it. How'd you like--" But the doctor shook his head. "We can't alter Nature, my dear boy. But I'll tell you for your comfort--in all my experience I've never known a woman have an easier time." "D'you mean--d'you mean--she'll get over it?" "Get over it? She's got over it already. She's as strong as a horse." He turned from Ranny with a swing of his coat tails that but feebly expressed his decision and his impatience. He paused before the closed doorway for a final word. "There's no earthly reason why she shouldn't nurse that baby." "What's that, sir?" said Ranny, arrested. "She _must_ nurse it. It's better for her. It's better for the child. If I were her husband I'd insist on it--_insist_. If she tells you she can't do it, don't believe her." "I say, I didn't know there'd been any trouble of that sort." "That's all the trouble there's been," the doctor said. And he entered on a brief and popular exposition of the subject, from which Ranny gathered that Violet was flying in the face of that Providence that Nature was. Superbly and exceptionally endowed and fitted for her end, Violet had refused the task of nursing-mother. "Why?" The doctor shrugged his shoulders, implying that anything so abstruse as young Mrs. Ransome's reasons was beyond him. He left Ranny struggling with the question: If it isn't weakness--_what_ is it? * * * * * For Violet persisted in her strange refusal, in spite of Ranny's remonstrances, his entreaties, his appeals. "It's been trouble enough," she said, "without that."