Lois felt that it would be good for Justin, too, and was glad that he had been persuaded to go; yet she caught him looking at her with such strange intentness a couple of times during the dinner that it discomposed her oddly. It made her a little silent; she pondered over it after she had gone up, as usual, to the baby. Was there something wrong with her appearance? She looked anxiously in the glass, and was annoyed to find that the white fichu, open at the throat, was not on quite straight, and her hair was a little disarranged. She was pale, and there were dark lines under her eyes. She hated not to look nice— Yet it might not be that. Was it, perhaps, that something else was wrong—that he had bad news which he did not like to tell? Was he to leave her again on some journey? She turned white for a moment, and sat down, to get the baby to sleep, and then resolutely tried to drive the thought from her. Yet, as she sat there rocking gently, the thought still came back to her, oddly, puzzlingly. Why had he looked at her like that? The smoke of his pipe down-stairs kept her still aware of his presence. Presently he came up-stairs and tiptoed into the room in clumsy fashion, for fear of waking the baby, in his quest for a handkerchief in a chiffonier drawer. After finding it, he stopped for a moment in front of her, with that odd, arrested expression once more. “You don’t mind my going out to-night and leaving you?” he murmured. “The doctor ought to have asked _you_ to go instead; you need it more than I.” “Oh, no, no!” she hastened to reassure. “I don’t mind at all, really!” Her eyes gazed up at him limpidly clear, and emptied of self. “I have to run up and down stairs so many times to baby now that I couldn’t go, no matter how much I was asked to. I’m only glad that you will have the distraction—you need it. I hope you’ll have a lovely time.” She listened to his descending footsteps, and after a moment or two arose and laid the sleeping child down in his crib. From across the hall she could hear Redge and Zaidee prattling to each other from their beds with an elfish glee that began to have long waits between its outbursts. In the dim light she went about the room, picking up toys and little discarded garments left by the children, folding the clothes away, her tall, graceful figure, in the large curves of its repeated bending and straightening, seeming to exemplify some unpainted Millet-like idea of mother-work, emblematic of its unceasing round. She was hanging up a tiny cloak in the half-gloom of her closet, when she heard her husband’s step once more stealing into the room, and the next moment saw him beside her. “What’s the matter?” she asked, with quick premonition.