Larrie was entertaining two bachelor friends and was holding a pipe with one side of his mouth, and with the other telling a late witticism of a Supreme Court judge. The men had come up about taking the cottage, and almost suspected a domestic crisis; Larrie's forced spirits deceived no one but Dot in the shadow of the pepper trees. She felt frozen with shame and horror. This was the man she would have humbled herself for! She turned to go back in silence the way she had come. But on the verandah there was a sudden movement; someone had discovered it was half-past eight, and being a Thursday evening the last train went down in eight minutes. They had their hats and sticks in ten seconds, and were halfway down the path. Larrie went with them. 'I'll see you safe in,' he said, 'we'll have to run for it.' His shadow fell at Dot's feet, then raced him down the road leading to the station. Dot breathed freely once more, then with steady steps she went up the path and round the verandah to Peggie's window. The woman was on her knees by the bedside, reading the _Bulletin_ by candlelight. She always abstracted it from the dining-room on Thursdays, the moment Larrie laid it down, for she had a strange passion for political caricatures, though to her knowledge she had never seen a Member of Parliament in her life. To-night she was convulsed over a minister of the crown portrayed in an eye-glass and ballet skirts. Dot crept in through the back door and went on tiptoe down the hall to the second room there. She made a warm bundle of the baby with the cot blankets and a New Zealand rug, then she went out into the hall again, holding it close to her happy breast. Larrie had left the front door just ajar, so she stole out noiselessly and walked down the path to the gate. The next minute she was fleeing up the road again to her mother, the burden in her arms the lightest thing in the world. CHAPTER XIV THE WHEEL IN THE BRAIN 'Mine, mine--not yours, It is not yours but mine,--give me the child' It was half-an-hour before Larrie came back and found the tossed, empty cot. He strode out of the house again, and up the hill in a fury of passion. Out of the train into which he had seen his friends, Wooster had stepped and gone at quick speed, straight up the road leading to the house. Larrie was not to know it was intended for the last visit of a lifetime. He resisted the inclination to follow and slay him outright, and went home instead--to find Dot had been there and taken away the child. A second jealousy sprang up in his heart, jealousy of his own little baby son. He could imagine the pass to which Dot had come, imagine the heart hungerness that had prompted this. But it was all for the child--none of the aching and longing had been for himself. The front door of the house was open, he went straight through the hall and upstairs two steps at a time to the sitting-room.