“We are all going to bed, Mr. Byrd,” said the doctor at last, noting his exhausted aspect. “I shall get two or, three hours' nap on the sofa before going back to town, and I hope you will take a thorough rest.” Stefan rose rather dizzily from his unfinished meal. “Please take my room,” he said, “I couldn't stay in the house--I'm going out.” He found the atmosphere of alert efficiency created by these women utterly insupportable. The house stifled him with its teeming feminine life. In it he felt superfluous, futile. Hurrying out, he stumbled down the slope and, stripping, dived into the water. Its cold touch robbed him of thought; he became at once merely one of Nature's straying children returned again to her arms. Swimming back, he drew on his clothes, and mounting to the garden, threw himself face down upon the grass, and fell asleep under the morning sun. He dreamed that a drum was calling him. Its beat, muffled and irregular, yet urged him forward. A flag waved dazzlingly before his eyes; its folds stifled him. He tried to move, yet could not--the drum called ever more urgently. He started awake, to find himself on his back, the sun beating into his face, and the doctor's machine chugging down the lane. VII The little June baby at the Byrdsnest was very popular with the neighborhood. During the summer it seemed to Stefan that the house was never free of visitors who came to admire the child, guess his weight, and exclaim at his mother's health. As a convalescent, Mary was, according to Constance Elliot, a complete fraud. Except for her hair, which had temporarily lost some of its elasticity, she had never looked so radiant. She was out of bed on the ninth day, and walking in the garden on the twelfth. The behavior of the baby--who was a stranger to artificial food--was exemplary; he never fretted, and cried only when he was hungry. But as his appetite troubled him every three hours during the day, and every four at night, he appeared to Stefan to cry incessantly, and his strenuous wail would drive his father from house to barn, and from barn to woods. Lured from one of these retreats by an interval of silence, Stefan was as likely as not to find an auto at the gate and hear exclamatory voices proceeding from the nursery, when he would fade into the woods again like a wild thing fearful of the trap. His old dislike of his kind reasserted itself. It is one thing to be surrounded by pretty women proclaiming you the greatest artist of your day, and quite another to listen while they exclaim on the perfections of your offspring and the health of your wife. For the first type of conversation Stefan had still an appetite; with the second he was quickly surfeited.