She was sitting up in her chair before the bedroom fire. They were alone. The nurse was downstairs at her supper. The Baby lay between them in its cradle, wrapped in a white shawl. Ranny was watching it. "I should have thought," he said, at last, "you couldn't have borne to let the little thing--" But she cut that short. "Little thing! It's all very well for _you_. You haven't been through what I have; if you had, p'raps you'd feel as I do." The Baby stirred in its shawl. Its eyes were still shut, but its lips began to curl open with a queer waving, writhing movement. "What does it mean," said Ranny, "when it makes that funny face?" "How should _I_ know?" said Violet. Little sounds, utterly helpless and inarticulate, came now from the cradle. "What nice noises it makes," said Ranny. He was stooping by the cradle, touching the Baby's soft cheek with his finger. "Look at it," he said. But Violet would not look. The Baby's face puckered and grew red. Its body writhed and stiffened. It broke into a cry that frightened him. "Oh, Lord!" said Ranny, "do you think I've hurt it? Hadn't you better take it up or something?" But Violet did not take it up. He looked at her in astonishment. She looked at him, and her face was sullen. The Baby screamed high. Ranny put his arm under the small warm thing and lifted it up out of its cradle. He had some idea of laying it on its mother's lap. The Baby stopped screaming. Ranny held it, with the nape of its absurdly loose and heavy head supported on his left wrist, and its little soft hips pressed into the hollow of his right hand. And as he held it he was troubled with a compassion and a tenderness unlike anything he had ever known before. For the Baby's helplessness was unlike anything he had ever known. And its innocence! Why, its hand, its incredibly tiny hand, had found his breast and was moving there for all the world as if he had been its mother. And to Ranny's amazement, with the touch, a queer little pricking pang went through his breast, as if a thin blood vessel had suddenly burst there. "D'you see that, Vi? Its little hand? What a rum thing a baby is!" But even that didn't move Violet, or turn her from her purpose, though she smiled. * * * * * From that moment Ranny's paternal instinct raised its head again. It had been crushed for the time being in his revolt against Violet's sufferings. But now it was indescribable, the feeling he had for his little daughter Dorothy. (Violet, since they _had_ to call the Baby something, had called it Dorothy.) Meanwhile, he hid his feeling. He maintained a perverse, a dubious, a critical silence while his mother and his mother-in-law and his Aunt Randall and the nurse overflowed in praise which, if the Baby had understood them, must have turned its head.