"No, they're so stupid these days; nothing but Wimbledon and padding. Why? Is there anything to-day?"
"No, no; nothing," he answered, and though I thought his manner a little odd, I had forgotten all about it later when Archdeacon Ryder, who was dining with us, suddenly asked:
"Did you notice the account of that painful accident in Westbourne Grove in this morning's 'News'? Those terrible perambulators! I wish they could be abolished. Maid servants' arms were stouter in my day. This stupid German nurse seems to have got dazed, or was staring everywhere but where her business lay. An only child, the paper stated, an editor's, but I don't remember the name. It was not one familiar to me. Did you know it?"
"I've heard it," Ronayne answered, and would have changed the subject, but I broke in:
"Oh, Ronayne, a German nurse! Can anything have happened to Mrs. Malise's baby? You needn't be silent. Oh, I'm sure it's he!"
And then it all came out—the fact that the child was killed while his nurse was trying to wheel him across the road in Westbourne Grove—but Ronayne wouldn't have any details told me.
The poor little man! My own baby's age, and such a sweet-tempered, patient little fellow! What a life! To come where he had but grudging welcome, to have no real mother, no warm little places of fond sunshine, and to go away from all this world's possibilities in that sudden cruelty! It wrung my heart, the hardness of it all. But could I really grieve, remembering how chill was the brief life, and remembering, above all, the scheme that was to make of him, so helpless and undefended, a spiritual outcast and foundling?
And since I saw his mother—I went yesterday, having first sacked Henley of white flowers, heliotrope, and fragrant leaves—and found her unshaken in composure, untouched by any sense of duty missed—since then I think I have been only glad that the little soul has taken flight.
Very white and peaceful he looked lying in his crib, and I heaped my flowers all about him.
"How much you loved him!" Mrs. Malise said, as she stood beside me looking at him.