Dr. Griffin went to the window and looked out. Then he took a magnifying glass from his pocket, and deliberately stared into the window opposite.
Then he went back to Dick. “My dear fellow,” he said, “you are to be congratulated. You are a father. I saw the nurse walking up and down the room with the child in her arms. It is a bad habit, by the way, and you must tell her not to teach it to the child. You can’t begin too young with them.”
After the Doctor went away, Dick buried his face in his pillow and wept softly.
“A little baby—yes, my little baby,” he whispered. “God bless the little woman. Some day she will sit with it at the window, and I shall have them both for company.”
And then one day, a soft, warm day, late in May, there she sat at the window again, with lilies instead of roses in her cheeks, and the bundle of flannel in her arms. She smiled at Dick, and tears of joy and love welled up in his eyes as he gazed upon the two.
“I’ve got two of ’em for company now, the little woman and the baby,” he whispered.
After that the days seemed very happy and bright, and Dick thought himself the richest man on earth. Only he wondered why the roses did not come back to the little woman’s cheeks.
“She doesn’t look as well as she ought to,” he told the Doctor one day in June, and the Doctor, peering over his spectacles, shook his head as he looked at her, but Dick did not see it.
Passing down the block one day, Dr. Griffin came face to face with a little girl who wheeled a baby carriage, and, as he glanced under the awning, he was startled to see two weirdly brilliant eyes, the very counterpart of Dick’s, gazing up at him.
“Whose child is this? Does it live over in the brick flats there?” queried the Doctor.