“Reckon she does,” said Ivy. PART VI: BABY 1 Tom did not come home till March, and the baby had been christened before he arrived, Thyrza having proved too soft to resist ecclesiastical pressure. But her husband was not so disappointed as she had feared. Indeed, Tom’s whole attitude towards the miracle she had wrought in his absence puzzled her a little. She had met him at the cottage door with the baby in her arms, and after their first greeting he had said: “Put the baby down, Thyrza. I can’t kiss you praaperly.” Then, with his face hidden in her neck, had murmured: “It’s my wife I want.” “But aun’t you justabout pleased wud your boy, dear?” she asked him later, when they were having tea and eggs in a cosy blur of firelight and sunshine. “Reckon I am. But babies are unaccountable ugly; and as fur hoalding him, I’d sooner nuss a dud shell.” “He aun’t ugly, Tom; everyone says he’s a justabout lovely child—and weighs near fourteen pounds, which is valiant fur a boy of his months.” “Maybe—I know naun of babies. But you, Thyrza ... reckon you’re justabout the waonder of the world to me.” Her eyes filled with tears as she felt his hand groping for hers on her knees under the table. “Reckon you’re just another baby,” she said tenderly. “And I’m the mother of you both.” 2 But Tom learned to be father as well as husband in the days that followed—perhaps it was the joys of his husbandhood which woke the fatherhood in him. It did not quicken in a blinding flash, as motherhood had come to Thyrza when her baby was first laid in her arms, but grew and throve in his daily contact with the little bit of helplessness and hope which he and Thyrza had made between them. It seemed to develop out of and be part of his love for her, and in time it seemed to have a tender, mellowing effect on that love, making it less anxious and passionate, more selfless, more sweet, more friendly.... Those days were different from the days they had spent together after their marriage. They never went for long walks now, but stopped in their little garden at the back of the cottage, where crocuses splashed the grass with purple and egg-yellow, and celandines crept in under the hedge from the fields of Egypt Farm. Here in the warm spring sunshine Thyrza would sit, rocking the baby’s cradle with her foot, while she talked to Tom in her sweet, drawly voice, of the little trades and doings of the past year. Every now and then the shop-bell would ring through the cottage, and she would go off to serve and gossip, leaving baby in his father’s care.... “And doan’t you dance him, Tom, or he’ll be sick.” For Tom was bolder now, and took perilous liberties with young William, just as now, in his third year of soldiering, he had begun to take them with the dud to which he had compared him.... “Reckon he’ll start fizzing a bit before he goes off.”