Page:Temple Bailey--The Gay cockade.djvu/331

 heart, and the lady of his heart, sitting wet and worried in the pale-gray bedroom, was saying to herself, monotonously, "It's all over now—no man could see me like this and love me"

Cecily and her husband and the doctor and Landry came in out of the darkness together. They went up-stairs together, then stopped on the threshold as Cissy held up a warning hand.

She continued to croon softly the lullaby which had belonged to her own babies: "Hushaby, sweet, my own"

It was Cecily and the doctor who went in to her, and Landry, standing back in the shadows, waited. He spoke to Cissy as she came out.

"I am going so early in the morning," he said, "will you give me just one little minute now?"

In that minute he told her that he loved her.

And Cissy, standing in the library in all the disorder of uncurled locks and gray kimono, demanded, after a rapturous pause, "But why didn't you tell me before?"

He found it hard to explain. "I didn't quite realize it—until I saw you there so tender and sweet, with the baby in your arms"

"A Madonna-creature," murmured Cissy Beale.

But he did not understand. "It isn't because I want you to sit in a chimney-corner—it wasn't fair of you to say that" 325