"Well," he hesitated, "night-night, in case you don't sit up."

"Good night," she replied. "I shan't sit up."

"You might make up the fire before you go to bed, though, there's a dear girl."

She did not answer, and he went out; she followed him to the doorway, and stood there watching him put on his overcoat and muffler again.

His pipe was between his teeth; he removed it for a second to kiss her cheek hastily, then restored it. With a hysterical anger held feverishly in check, she thought that male imperturbability, male selfishness, were incredible.

"Night-night!" he said again, going out. "I'll bring you a programme."

The door shut. She was alone. She advanced passionately upon the strewn dinner-table; it waited there to be cleared by the work of her hands, as imperturbable as he.

She dashed off the candle-shades first.

"What a day!" she gasped.

Early morning and the awakening in the cold, the brushing of grates and the lighting of fires, the sweeping and cooking, to get a man off warmed and comfortable to business; the long, long hours of silence and domestic tasks, waiting for his return; his return to his food; his departure again; a desolate evening of silence and domestic tasks--these were that span of hope and promise called a day.

Married life!

CHAPTER XIII

"THE VERY DEVIL"

When spring had passed, and part of the summer, the Osborn Kerrs did as all their neighbours did; they packed up their best clothes, folded the baby's cot, swathed the ten-guinea perambulator, and with the baby and his cumbersome impedimenta, made an exhausting effort and went to the sea.

They did not go to the sea altogether lightly; it had cost a great deal of thought and arithmetic and discussion as to a stopping-place.

Osborn was keen on a boarding-house; he knew a jolly one where he had stayed before, but Marie vetoed that. They wouldn't have babies in boarding-houses; they wouldn't like her keeping the perambulator there, and wheeling it through the hall; likewise they wouldn't like her intruding into the back regions with it. She knew that what one did with a young family was to take rooms, and cater for oneself. So they wrote to engage rooms, and after much correspondence found what would suit their purse, and started for a week by the sea.

The baby fretted a little during its unaccustomed travelling, and, fretting, fretted its parents. Osborn was dimly annoyed with Marie for not being able to keep the baby up to the best standard of infantile behaviour, feeling that the things he was called upon to do, in a public railway carriage, made him look a fool; and Marie was hurt with Osborn that he should show so little sympathy and patience. She wrote, upon arrival, a letter to Mrs. Amber, which brought her down within a couple of days, to stay at a boarding-house within a stone's throw.

Grandmother was very good. She was always nice-tempered and kind and soothing. In the morning she came round early to the rooms in a side street, and took the baby out for his airing upon the promenade, so that Marie and Osborn might bathe together. She it was who persuaded their landlady to take charge of the baby for just one hour, one afternoon, while Marie and Osborn came to take fashionable tea with her at the boarding-house. In the evening, when the pier was lighted and the band played, and the summer life of the place was at its giddiest, she would arrive with her comfortable smile and her knitting to sit within earshot of her sleeping grandson while his parents went out to enjoy themselves.

Marie did not know what she would have done without the wise woman upon this holiday; but when they talked together she was still shy of confidences, and still reluctant to admit any but the most modern interpretation of the married relationship. Mrs. Amber, however, saw all there was to see and felt no resentment about it. Things were so; and they always had been. You might be miserable if you were married, but then you would have been far more miserable if you had not married. She pitied all spinsters profoundly. She was glad her daughter had found a husband and a home; and she would not have dreamed of combating Osborn. He was that strange, wilful despotic thing, a man. She would have handed him without contest that dangerous weapon of complete power over a woman and her children. Mrs. Amber propitiated Osborn; she pleased and flattered him; and her judgment of him was that he was far better than he might have been.

Grannie travelled back with them to town, and she was very useful during the journey. She kept a strict eye upon the hand-luggage and nursed the baby, while Marie and Osborn smiled together over the sketches in a humorous weekly. Their money was all spent, and they were really half-relieved to be going back to the flat, where they need not keep up that air of being so very pleased with every detail of a rather strained holiday. They would meet other people they knew, who had similarly enjoyed themselves, and would cry:

"Have _you_ been away? We're just back. We went to Littlehampton and had a gorgeous time! We had such awf'ly comfortable rooms, not actually _on_ the front, but within a minute's walk. We _prefer_ rooms to an hotel. We enjoyed ourselves tremendously.

Where did you go?"

Mrs. Amber was with Marie a great deal during the rest of that hot summer; she had waited for the close intimacy of the honeymoon time, of the first year, to wear away; she had bided her hour very patiently. When the husband began--as he would--to go out for an hour after dinner, just to meet a friend, and would stay two--three, four hours perhaps, then the mother had come into her own again. Sitting with the strangely-quietened Marie by the open windows of the pale sitting-room--which they could use again with perfect economy during the summer weather--Mrs. Amber was well content with the way of things. She knitted placidly for baby George all the while, and Marie, who hated knitting, sewed for him.

They were evenings such as Mrs. Amber the young wife used to spend with her own mother, while young Mr. Amber betook himself to the strange and unexplained haunts of men.

And on one of these evenings, while the weather was still warm enough to sit looking out into the darkness through the opened windows, but when an autumn haze had begun to hang again about the night, Marie had something to tell her mother, which had blanched her cheek and moistened her eyes all day.

"Mother, I don't know _what_ you'll think, but--I'm going to have another baby."

"Oh--my--dear!" said Mrs. Amber.

The two women gazed into each other's eyes, and while a half-pleased expression stole through the solicitude in Mrs. Amber's, Marie's were wide with fear.

"Are you sure, duck?" said the elder woman, her knitting dropped in her lap.

"Sure," Marie murmured hoarsely. "I've been afraid--and I waited before I told you. But I'm sure. It--it'll be next summer--in the hot weather, just when we'd have been going away to the sea. We shan't be able to afford to go to Littlehampton next year."

"An only child," said Mrs. Amber comfortingly, "is a mistake. It's almost cruel to have an only child. You'll be much better with two than one."

"How can you say so? All that to go through again--"

"Oh, duck, I know! But it won't be so bad next time; anyone'll tell you that. Ask your doctor."

"I shan't have the doctor till I'm obliged."

"I'm sure Osborn would wish you to--"

"How do you know what Osborn would wish?" And she said as so many rebellious women have said before her: "He promised I should never have another. He was crying. I've never told you before, but he was.

He cried; and promised me."

"Cried!" Mrs. Amber echoed aghast. "Poor fellow, oh, poor fellow!

Osborn has a very good heart. The dear boy!"

"What about me, mother? Where's your sympathy for me? I cried, too."

"We're different."

"No, we aren't. And he _promised_."

"Oh, my duck," said Mrs. Amber in a voice of confidential bustle, "that's not to be depended on. Men always promise these things; I've known it scores of times. But it doesn't do to depend upon them, love."

"I despise men."

"Oh, don't say that, like Miss Winter. I never did approve of that girl."

"She's wiser than I. She won't marry."

"I guess she hasn't had the chance," said Mrs. Amber, with the disbelief of the old married woman in spinster charms.

"Oh, yes, she has, mother. She's had several chances. But she knows when she's lucky; she's her own mistress, and she has her own money and her freedom."

"She's missing a great deal; and some day she'll know it."

"She knows it now, thank you. She knows she's missing illness and pain and poverty and worry, and the whims and fancies and bad tempers of a husband."