"It was not your fault. A man has so many occupations; and women who are clever--or very handsome--I suppose that's an occupation too. Sometimes I've felt that when dinner was ordered I had nothing to do till the next day." "Oh," he groaned. "It wasn't your fault," she insisted. "I never told you--but when I chose that rose-bud paper for the front room upstairs, I always thought--" "Well--?" "It would be such a pretty paper--for a baby--to wake up in. That was years ago, of course; but it was rather an expensive paper... and it hasn't faded in the least..." she broke off incoherently. "It hasn't faded?" "No--and so I thought...as we don't use the room for anything ... now that Aunt Sophronia is dead...I thought I might... you might...oh, Julian, if you could only have seen it just waking up in its crib!" "Seen what--where? You haven't got a baby upstairs?" "Oh, no--not _yet_," she said, with her rare laugh--the girlish bubbling of merriment that had seemed one of her chief graces in the early days. It occurred to him that he had not given her enough things to laugh about lately. But then she needed such very elementary things: it was as difficult to amuse her as a savage. He concluded that he was not sufficiently simple. "Alice," he said, almost solemnly, "what _do_ you mean?" She hesitated a moment: he saw her gather her courage for a supreme effort. Then she said slowly, gravely, as though she were pronouncing a sacramental phrase: "I'm so lonely without a little child--and I thought perhaps you'd let me adopt one....It's at the hospital...its mother is dead...and I could...pet it, and dress it, and do things for it...and it's such a good baby...you can ask any of the nurses...it would never, _never_ bother you by crying..." II