“Tell me what it all means, lovey dear.” “I’m going to. Shut that door first.” She did as she was told. The listening spirits of the fog were baffled. When the door opened again, Mark was standing in the entry, the burden still in his arms, while Mother Carey pleaded urgently behind him. “A lump sum, deary. Come!” “No,” he said; “a pension. A quarterly gag on your tongue, or nothing. You can take or leave.” “I take!” she whispered shrilly--“I take! Be careful of that step, deary.” He vanished into the fog. At the mouth of the passage the cab was drawn up by the kerb, watching for him like a squat, red-eyed dragon, and gulping him the moment he appeared. Half way home the pale little nurse broke suddenly into hysterical panting and weeping. “Why don’t you give it me back? Why do you always keep it in your own arms?” “I’m afraid of you, Ellen,” he said quietly. “You look somehow as if you weren’t to be trusted.” They were passing a lighted shop at the moment. With a quick, unsuspected action she snatched the veil from the baby’s face. “Ah!” she screamed--“it’s dead! You’ve had it killed!” For a single instant the naked soul of him looked out--obscene--murderous. But he drove it back. “You little wild fool,” he said deeply. “Wasn’t I right? Your nerves are anyhow. You aren’t to be trusted, with your fancies.” She hardly seemed to hear him. All of a sudden she was struggling with the door handle. “Let me out! I’m fainting! I can bear no more. I will be good--I want to go home--I----” Sore encumbered as he was, she proved too quick for him. In an instant she had jerked open the door and flung herself into the fog. Some heavy vehicle was lumbering past at the moment. A scream like the cry of a rusty axle broke from among its wheels. The cab rolled on, its driver unnoticing, or diplomatic, perhaps, over an accident which he connected, if at all, with other than his fare. Paralysed for an instant, the next, Mark had softly closed the swinging door. “There’s no help for it,” he thought, momentarily death-white. “I must go on and play the game.” He played it, for all that rebuff, so convincingly, that the issue left him full twenty years’ triumphant enjoyment of its fruits. That same night his wife woke for the first time to her full reason, and looked intently into his eyes. “Am I to be allowed to see it?” she said. He bowed his head distressfully. “By my full will, if not the will of a Greater,” he murmured. “It is dead?” He rose, and went and brought, and placing the little forlorn shape in her arms, left her with it a while. When he returned, it was put aside gently but indifferently. “Bury my poor past,” she said. “It reproaches me with an altered face. Yet I can’t help myself--I think I never could. You wouldn’t wish it, you know; and what you wish or don’t wish comes to happen or to fail.” He looked at her mildly, but with protesting eyes.