It was when the days were nearly at their shortest that the round and tenor of his life was broken by the shock of a disturbing knowledge. Trudging homewards toward sunset on a mild December evening, he came upon his wife sitting groaning in the path; she had been on her way to the stream for water when a paroxysm of sickness overtook her. Since the days of starvation he had never seen her ill and the violence of the paroxysm frightened him; when it was over and she leaned on him exhausted as he led her back to their camping-place, he questioned her anxiously as to what had upset her—had she pain, had she eaten anything unwholesome or unusual? She shook her head silently in answer to his queries till he sat her down by the fire; then, as he knelt beside her, stirring the logs into a blaze, she caught his arm suddenly and pressed her face tightly against it. “Ow, Theodore, I’m going to ’ave a baiby!” “What?” he said. “What?”—and stared at her, his mouth wide open.... Perhaps she was hurt or disappointed at his manner of taking the news; at any rate she burst into floods of noisy weeping, rocking herself backwards and forwards and hiding her face in her hands. He did his best to soothe her, stroking her hair and encircling her shoulders with an arm; seeking vainly for the words that would stay her tears, for something that would hearten and uplift her. He supposed she was frightened—more frightened even than he was; his first bewildered thought, when he heard the news, had been “What, in God’s name, shall we do?” He drew her head to his shoulder, muttering “There, there,” as one would to a child, till her noisy demonstrative sobbing died down to an intermittent whimper; and when she was quieted she volunteered an answer to the question his mind had been forming. She thought it would be somewhere about five months—but it mightn’t be so long, she couldn’t be sure. She didn’t know enough about it to be sure—how could she, seeing as it was her first?... She had been afraid for ever so long now—weeks and weeks—but she’d gone on hoping and that was why she hadn’t said anything about it before. Now there wasn’t any doubt—she wondered he hadn’t seen for himself ... and she clung to him again with another burst of noisy weeping. “But,” he ventured uncertainly, reaching out after comfort, “when it’s over—and there’s the baby—you’ll be glad, won’t you?” His appeal to the maternal instinct had no immediate success. Ada protested with yet noisier crying that she was bound to die when the baby came, so how could she possibly be glad? It was all very well for him to talk like that—he didn’t have to go through it! Lots of women died, even when they had proper ’orspitals and doctors and nurses....