The clock struck eleven.
Then the baby's godmother laid down the fire-iron and began to speak, her hands clasped firmly around her large knees.
"Flower, when a man such as your husband wants you, you should leave everything—everything—to go to him. What are social engagements and servants' plans, ay, even children, compared with the needs of such a man as Deryck? Oh, my dear, couldn't you hear the appeal in his voice? It was like the cry of a tired child in the dark, groping for its resting-place, which just wants lifting up into its mother's arms and hushing to sleep. Strong man though he is—and I suppose you and I can hardly realize how strong he is when coping with the great needs of others—he will always be a boy where he loves. He is so young in heart, so eternally, passionately young. He wants mothering just now. He is doing the work of three men, and doing it at high pressure. I hear of it from outside, as perhaps you cannot. And when the day is over he needs a place of rest—a tender, understanding place of rest, where he can talk or be silent, sleep or wake, as the fancy takes him, but where he will never be left alone to live again through the happenings of the day, too tired to escape them. And oh, Flower, you, and you alone, can do this for him. Shall I tell you? I know half-a-dozen women at least who would throw over social engagements, leave husbands, children, everything, and go down to stay at Brighton or anywhere else on the chance of five minutes' conversation with Deryck, or of his needing, at the moment, a comrade and friend."
"Horrid creatures!" cried Flower, mockingly, "their husbands ought to have something to say to them for running after mine. I wonder a proper person like you, Jane, is not ashamed to talk of them. And you need not try to make me jealous. It is one of my theories that only small minds are jealous. I have always stood far above the feeling."
"I know, dear, I know," said the baby's godmother, hastily. "I had not the faintest hope of making you jealous. Besides, why should you be? Deryck has never looked twice at any woman but you. We all know that."
Flower laid down her scissors and came and knelt on the hearthrug, mollified and a little wistful. She spread out her damp hands to the blaze and looked up into the baby's godmother's plain face, with a mischievous, inquisitive smile.
"Do you know, Jane," she said, "I have sometimes wondered—you seem to know each other so intimately—whether in the long-ago days, before he met me, Deryck ever proposed to you?"
The baby's godmother laughed, and again stirred the fire with her toe.
"Well, my dear, you may rest assured he never did so, for the most conclusive of all reasons,—I should not have refused him."
Flower laughed gaily.