He was with Mrs. Ousley when her child was born—he saved her life and the child's life and his friend's happiness. And in response he found that both of them were now drawing him into that closer friendship which rests upon danger shared and passed—upon respect and power.
The first day that Mrs. Ousley sat in her drawing-room with her infant across her knees the doctor was there; and as he studied the perfect group—husband and wife and child—it seemed to him that behind them should have shone the full-orbed golden splendor of this life's ideal happiness.
"There is only one way out of it for me," he muttered bitterly as he went down the steps. "I must marry and fall in love with my own wife and with the mother of my own children."
That afternoon he drove toward the stately homestead of the summer lawns and tennis matches—but when he reached the front gate, he drove past.
It was a few months after this, toward the end of a long conversation with Mrs. Ousley, in which she now broached with feminine tact and urgency the subject of his marriage, it was as he told her good-by that there escaped from him the first intimation of his love—unexpectedly as an electric spark flashing across a vacuum.
When he was miles away he said to himself:
"This must stop—this must be stopped: if I cannot stop it, some one else must help me to stop it."
That afternoon he began again his visits to the stately homestead of the lawns and the tennis courts; and a month or two later he drove by and said to Mrs. Ousley:—
"I am engaged to be married."
She gave him a quick startled look, thinking not of him, but with a woman's intuitive forecast sending her sympathy and apprehension on into the life of another woman.