"Never—"
"Why not?"
Cissy went on to her doom. "Because you'll want to put me on the shelf like all the rest of them. You'll want to see me with—my hair—parted—and spectacles. And my eyes are perfectly good—and my hair is my own—"
She stopped. Landry was surveying her with hard eyes.
"Don't you love—the baby—?"
Cissy shrugged. "Perhaps. I don't know yet. Some day I may when I haven't anything to do but sit in a chimney-corner."
Thus spoke Cissy Beale, making of herself a heartless creature, flinging back into the face of Valentine Landry his most cherished ideals.
But what did it matter? She had known from the moment of her confession that he would be repelled. What man could stand up in the face of the world and marry a grandmother!—the idea was preposterous.
She finished dinner with her head in the air; she was hypocritically lively during the drive home; she said "Good-night" and "Good-bye" without feeling, and went up-stairs with her heart like lead to find the nurse weeping wildly on the first landing.
The baby, it appeared, was very ill. And the baby's father and mother, having left the little cherub sleeping peacefully, were motoring somewhere in the wide spaces of the world. The family doctor was out. She had called up another doctor, and he would come as soon as he could. But in the meantime the baby was dying—