"Then you do trust me?" she muttered.

"You know I do."

They sat there leaning against each other till the room grew dim. Then they rose, uncertainly; and hand in hand, as it were under the old enchantment, they went upstairs into the dark room where the Baby slept.

To-night he did not look at it.


CHAPTER XX

That was on the eighth of June.

He remembered, because it was a Saturday, Saturdays and Sundays being the landmarks of his existence by which alone he measured the distances and marked the order of events. The habit of so regarding them was contracted in his early days at Woolridge's, when only in and by those hours snatched from Woolridge's did he live. All other days of the week were colored and had value according to their nearness to Saturday and Sunday. Monday was black, Tuesday brown, Wednesday a browny gray, Thursday a rather clearer gray (by Thursday you had broken the back of the week), Friday distinctly rosy, and Saturday and Sunday, even when it rained, a golden white.

He hadn't been married a year before all the seven were shady; the colors ran into each other till even Sundays became a kind of grayish drab. And still he continued to date things by Saturdays and Sundays; as he did now in his mind, exultantly, thus: "Saturday, the eighth: Jujubes knocked out in the first round."

Not that the dates went for very much with Ranny, to whom interesting things so seldom happened. He remembered this one more because of his scoring off Jujubes than because of the scene with Violet and its sequel. He was used to scenes and sequels, and was no longer concerned to note their correspondence and significance. So that he never noted now that it was on and after Thursday, the thirteenth, that what he called the Great Improvement had begun.