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Rh wonder he doesn't get leave to sleep in the carriage that will form part of the train next day."

"For Heaven's sake don't suggest it to him!" said Lucia. "He would certainly do it, and wonder he hadn't thought of it before. Dear, dear! how nicely we should all get on if it wasn't for our husbands!"

"That is a profound observation," said Mouse. "But, then, on the whole, it is possible to get on fairly well with them."

Edgar found plenty to occupy him at Brayton, but it was that which he brought with him that occupied him most of all. Day and night there sat in its dark corner of his mind that grey form of his distrust and suspicion. Sometimes, even now, though it had become so solid and real, he could make it, so to speak, close its eyes and doze, but it was only by the strongest effort on his part that he could thus lull it to rest, and even then it did not quit its corner; it still sat there, though for the time it might be quiescent. It was chiefly when he was with his child and Lucia's that these moments of its quiescence came; with that chuckling, crowing atom which was bone of her bone, and contained life also that was in him, he could, though by an effort, make himself believe that he had made a gross and wellnigh unforgiveable mistake, that it was her due that he should ask her pardon abjectly, imploringly, humbly for these weeks of poisoned thought that had so incessantly and causelessly wronged her. And at such moments it seemed to him that a wraith of himself stood by him and reproached him, that wraith of his true self which had loved her, and was, indeed, save that it inhabited his flesh and bones, an entity which no longer had anything in common with that which made up his present consciousness. Then, even while the spell of their child's presence was with him, the wraith of his true self would vanish again, and he would ask himself what this child who was so much to him had been, or was, to its mother, whether she had ever shown sign that she knew how this living link was that which made her unity with him.

But there had no such sign been shown. Neither to him, since the birth of their child, nor to it had she given that spontaneous abandonment of herself that is what wifehood and motherhood mean. And the eyes of the grey form that sat in the dusk were open again and fixed on him. It seemed to have moved a little nearer, too, and the darkness that enshrouded it had lifted a little.