"You managed to escape?"
He looked at her hastily, a little red creeping over his pallid face. She spoke almost as to a deserter. "I couldn't have done any good," he said.
She smiled and closed her eyes, as though against him. It was not a natural smile, it drew her lips tight.
"What could I do?" he asked her pleadingly.
She opened her eyes again and looked at him in that remote and quiet regard.
"Men are queer. If you had been suffering, I would never have run away."
He wanted to expostulate, to explain how different such a case would be; how, as a matter of course, a wife's place was beside her husband in good and ill, most particularly ill—but he did not find the heart to do it. She looked so fatigued and was so deadly quiet. He felt at a loss, and looked around vaguely till his eye lighted on the cot. There, beneath the muslin and ribbon which had at last been crisply laundered, lay a burden, now minute, but about to cling and grow like an Old Man of the Sea.
"How's the baby?" he asked, tiptoeing to it.
"It's a girl," said Marie; "I expect you've been told."
He had not been told, having made no inquiry. Here again the story-books which had informed him of romantic life in his very young days had been at fault; they made such an idealised picture of all that had just taken place, and they told about the joy in the heart of a man and the ecstasy in the heart of a woman. Osborn looked down upon a tiny, red and crumpled face.