She looked up at him with a curious mixture of questioning and defiance in her eyes.
"I don't know why it is that I always manage to make you angry," she said; "I must be very stupid. I always know you will be angry before you have done with me. When we were downstairs"—
"When we were downstairs," he put in, hotly, "we were two honest human beings, without any barriers of conventional pretence between us, and you allowed me to think you meant to take what I had to offer, and then, suddenly, all is changed, and the barrier is between us again, because you choose to place it there, and profess that you must regard me, in your pretty, civil way, as a creature to be considered and treated with form and ceremony."
"Thank you for calling it a pretty way," she said.
And yet there was a tone in her low voice which softened his wrath somehow,—a rather helpless tone, which suggested that she had said the words only because she had no other resource, and still must utter her faint protest.
"It is for me," he went on, "to come to you with a civil pretence instead of an honest intention? I am not sufficiently used to conventionalities to make myself bearable. I am always blundering and stumbling. No one can feel that more bitterly than I do; but you have no right to ignore my claim to do what I can when I might be of use. I might be of use, because the child is fond of me, and in my awkward fashion I can quiet and amuse her as you say no one but yourself can."
"Will you tell me?" she asked, frigidly, "what right I have to permit you to make of yourself a—a nursemaid to my child?"
"Call it what you like," he answered. "Speak of it as you like. What right does it need? I came because"—
His recollection of her desolateness checked him. It was not for him to remind her again by his recklessness of speech that her husband had not felt it necessary to provide against contingencies. But she filled up the sentence.