"I am sure she will," the sergeant said briefly, and then added, "There is nothing else she could do," and saluting he went out of the room.
"He suspects his wife of having done it on purpose," Dr. Parker said, speaking for the first time since the sergeant had entered the room. "I don't say he knows it, but he suspects it. Did you notice how decidedly he said that she would consent? And I fancy up to now she has had her own way in everything."
"Well, what do they say?" Mrs. Humphreys asked as her husband entered the door. He told her shortly the offer that had been made. She laughed scornfully. "A likely thing that! So they are to have both children, and I am not to be allowed even to see them; and they are to pick and choose as to which they like to say is theirs, and we are to be shouldered out of it altogether! It is just as bad for me not to know which is my boy as it is for that woman; but they are to take the whole settlement of things in their hands, my feelings to go for nothing. Of course you told them that you would not let them do such a thing?"
"I did not tell them anything of the sort. I told them that I accepted their proposal, and that I could answer for your accepting it too."
"Then you were never more wrong in your life, John Humphreys!" she said angrily; "I won't consent to anything of the sort. Luck has thrown a good thing in our hands, and I mean to make the most of it. We ought to get enough out of this to make us comfortable for life if we work it well. I did not think that you were such a soft!"
"Soft or not soft, it is going to be done as they propose," her husband said doggedly. "It is burden enough as it is—we have lost our child. Not that I care so very much about that; there will be time enough for more, and children do not add to the comfort of close little quarters like these. But whether we like it or not, we have lost the child. In the next place we shall never hear the end of it in the regiment, and I shall see if I cannot manage to get transferred to another. There will be no standing the talk there will be."
"Let them talk!" his wife said scornfully. "What do we care about their talk!"
"I care a great deal," he said. "And I tell you why, because I know what they will say is true."
"What do you mean?" she asked quickly.
"I mean, Jane, that I know you mixed up those children on purpose."