Her eyes dilated, and he guessed what she was thinking of. "I know,
sweetest, I know," he said hastily, "but try not to remember it; it's
all over and done with; and, Marie, I suffered, too."

She remembered, then, the tears they had shed together on the night of
the baby's birth, and her heart was soft.

The night seemed punctuated to Osborn by the crying of the baby. It
woke at regular hours, as if it could read some clock in the darkness;
and quickly as, it seemed to him, he must have roused, Marie had
wakened quicker, and was hushing the child. He could hear her soft
whispers through the darkness, in the subsequent silences during which
he guessed, with a thrill of anxious awe, that she was feeding it;
frail as she was, she gave of what strength she had to the baby. Never
had Marie seemed more wonderful to Osborn.

Very early in the morning she was tending the baby; he wished that he
had been able to keep the nurse longer. He left her reluctantly after
breakfast, to get through the baby's bath and toilet unaided, before
the heavier work of the flat. Women who knew would have understood why
Marie trembled and despaired at the tasks before her. When the baby
cried as, with hands still weakened, she tried to hold up its slipping
little body in the bath, she cried, too. As she cried, she thought how
tears seemed to be always near her eyes during these married days. Was
something wrong with marriage? Before, in her careless girl-days, she
had never wept; she had never so suffered, so wearied and despaired.
While she questioned, she dressed the baby in the flannel and lawn
things she had made for it a long while ago, and when she had dressed
it, she fed it again, and again it slept.