He helped her on to her feet; and, hand in hand, softly and in silence, they went upstairs and stood side by side looking down on the unconscious beauty of their sleeping child. "She forms a link," he said. "When her blue eyes look into your eyes, you'll remember." He bent down and laid his hand over the baby hands and kissed the soft cheek. "I'll miss her," he said; and straightened himself and turned away from the cot abruptly. Esme followed him to the door. "No; don't come down. We'll part here. I can let myself out." He took her by the shoulders and held her a little way off, looking at her long and earnestly as though he wished to impress her features on his memory for ever. "Some time in the far off future we may meet again," he said. "God knows. Anyhow, you will live always in my heart. Good-bye, and God bless you." His hands slipped to the back of her shoulders, drew her to him, held her. She lifted her face to his; and in the dimly lit room where the baby slept, and where the man was to part from both wife and child, they clung together and kissed for the last time, not as lovers, but solemnly and tenderly, as dear friends embrace, knowing they may never meet again. Then the man went swiftly down the stairs and let himself quietly out of the house. Book 4--CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT. Sleep was long in coming to Esme that night. She lay in the little bed in the room where, as a girl, she had slept soundly in the untroubled days before love had entered into her life, lay wide-eyed in the hot stillness, with the heavy scent of the oleander stealing into the room, perfuming the night, filling the little garden and the surrounding air with its sweetness, bringing back with its familiar fragrance a rush of memories, shy sweet memories of the days when Paul was her lover and she slept with his letters beneath her pillow and sometimes dreamed of him. So much had happened since those care-free days to change her, to alter all her views of life, that the girl who had slept there before seemed almost a stranger to her. One quality they shared in common; there was one flaming harmony across their sky amid the wind-swept clouds of discontent and passing griefs and early intolerances, love. The girl had lain there and dreamed of love, and felt love aglow in her heart; the woman lay there with heart and brain filled with love--compassionate love, deep and tender and protective in quality--for her husband, for the man who loved her as a husband, and for the small life which God had given her to complete her world. These three lives, so intimately and closely associated with her own, asserted each its separate claim. Never could she forget, or cease to think kindly and with grateful heart, of the man who was the father of her child. She would love the child more tenderly through her undying affection for George Sinclair. The child forged a link, as he had said, between them for all time.