"Perhaps," Henry Houghton said, doubtfully, "I ought to say that Mrs. Houghton—who is the wisest woman I know, as well as the best—has an idea that in matters of this sort, frankness is the best course. But in your case (of which, of course, she knows nothing) I don't agree with her."
"It would be impossible," Maurice said, briefly. And his guardian, whose belief in secrecy had been shaken, momentarily, by his Mary's opinion, felt that, so long as he had quoted her, his conscience was clear. So he only told the boy again he was sure he could bet on him! And because shame, and those bleak words "my own fault," kept the spiritual part of Maurice alive,—(and because Lily was a white blackbird!) the bet stood.
But he made no promises about the future. However much of a liar Maurice was going to be, to Eleanor, he would not, he told himself, lie to this old friend by saying he would never see Lily again. The truth was, some inarticulate moral instinct made him know that there would come a time when he would have to see her... During all that winter, when he sat, night after night, at Miss Ladd's dinner table, and Eleanor fended off Miss Moore and the widow, or when, in those long evenings in their own room they played solitaire, he was thinking of Lily, thinking of that inner summons to what he called "decency," which would, he knew, drive him—in three months—in two months—in one month!—to Lily's door. By and by it was three weeks—two weeks—one week! Then came days when he said, in terror, "I'll go to-morrow." And again: "To-morrow, I must go. Damn it! I must!" So at last, he went, lashed and driven by that mastering "decency"!
He had bought a box of roses, and, looping two fingers through its strings, he walked twice around the block past the ugly apartment house before he could make up his mind to enter. He wondered whether Lily had died? Women do die, sometimes. "Of course I don't want anything to happen to her; but—" Then he wondered, with a sudden pang of hope, if anything had happened to—It? "They're born dead, sometimes!" Nothing wrong in wishing that, for the Thing would be better off dead than alive. He wished he was dead himself! ... The third time he came to the apartment house the string of the box was cutting into his fingers, and that made him stop, and set his teeth, and push open the door of the vestibule. He touched the button under the name "Dale," and called up, huskily, "Is Miss—Mrs. Dale in?" A brisk voice asked his name. "A friend of Mrs. Dale's," he said, very low. There seemed to be a colloquy somewhere, and then he was told to "come right along!" He turned to the stairway, and as he walked slowly up, it came into his mind that this was the way a man might climb the scaffold steps: Step... Step... Step—his very feet refusing! Step... Step—and Lily's door. The nurse, who met him on the landing, said Mrs. Dale would be glad to see him....
She was in bed, very white and radiant, and with a queer, blanketed bundle on one arm; if she was, as the nurse said, "glad to see him," she did not show it. She was too absorbed in some gladness of her own to feel any other kind of gladness. As Maurice handed her the box of roses, she smiled vaguely and said. "Why, you're real kind!" Then she said, eagerly, "He was born the day the pink hyacinth came out! Want to see him?" Her voice thrilled with joy. Without waiting for his answer—or even giving a look at the roses the nurse was lifting out of their waxed papers, she raised a fold of the blanket and her eyes seemed to feed on the little red face with its tightly shut eyes and tiny wet lips.
Maurice looked—and his heart seemed to drop, shuddering, in his breast. "How nasty!" he thought; but aloud he said, stammering, "Why it's—quite a baby."
"You may hold him," she said; there was a passionate generosity in her voice.
Maurice tried to cover his recoil by saying, "Oh, I might drop it."
Lily was not looking at him; it seemed as if she was glad not to give up the roll of blankets, even for a minute. "He's perfectly lovely. He's a reg'lar rascal! The doctor said he was a wonderful child. I'm going to have him christened Ernest Augustus; I want a swell name. But I'll call him Jacky." She strained her head sidewise to kiss the red, puckered flesh, that looked like a face, and in which suddenly a little orifice showed itself, from which came a small, squeaking sound. Maurice, under the shock of that sound, stood rigid; but Lily's feeble arms cuddled the bundle against her breast; she said, "Sweety—Sweety—Sweety!"
The young man sat there speechless.... This terrible squirming piece of flesh—was part of himself! "I wouldn't touch it for a million dollars!" he was thinking. He got up and said: "Good-by. I hope you—"