Paul perceived uneasily some enigmatic quality in her quiet answer, and went on reasonably: "Now, Lydia, don't go making yourself out a martyr because I didn't come back. You know I'd have come if there was anything to be done! I'd have come from the ends of the earth to help you nurse her if we'd had to do that! But, thank the Lord, I make enough money so we could do better by the little tad than that!" "Suppose I had gone to the theater that night," asked Lydia slowly. "There was nothing I could do here." Paul was justifiably aggrieved. "Good Lord, Lydia! I wasn't off amusing myself! I was doing _business!_" His special accent for the word was never more pronounced. "Making money to pay for the trained nurses that saved her life," he ended. His conviction of the unanswerable force of this statement put him again in good humor. "Now, little madame, you listen to me. You're going to take a junketing honeymoon off with me, or I'll know the reason why! I'm going to take you up to Put-in-Bay for a vacation! Pretty near all our card-club gang are there now, and we'll have a gay old time and cheer you up! I bet you just let yourself go, and worried yourself into a fever, didn't you?" During this speech Lydia stood leaning against him, feeling the cloth of his sleeve rough on her bare forearm, feeling the stir and life of his body, the warmth of his breath on her face. She had an impulse to scream wildly to him, as though to make him hear and stop and turn, before he finally disappeared from her sight; and she faced him dumbly. There were no words to tell him--she tried to speak, but before his absent, kind, wandering eyes, a foreknowledge of her own inarticulateness closed her lips. He had not been there, and so he would never know. She stirred, moved away, and rearranged the flowers in a vase. "Oh, yes; I worried, of course," she said. "The baby was awfully sick for three days." She felt desperately that she was failing in the most obvious duty not to try to make him understand what had happened in his absence. She bethought herself of one fact, the mere statement of which should tell him a thousand times more eloquently than words, something of what she had suffered. "The doctor told me twice that she wouldn't have been sick if she hadn't been weaned." She said this with an accent of immense significance, clasping her hands together hard. Paul was unpacking his suit-case. "Great Scott! You nursed her six months!" he said conclusively, over his shoulder. "Besides, you _had_ to wean her--don't you remember?" "Oh, yes; I remember," said Lydia. Her hands dropped to her sides. "Don't they get over things quickly?" commented Paul, looking around at the baby. "To see her creeping around like a little hop-toad and squeaking that rubber bunny--why, I declare, I don't believe that anything's been the matter with her at all. You and the doctor lost your nerve, I guess."