“If I’d only known then all I do now,” she said.

She laughed at Philip, because he was anxious about its welfare.

“You couldn’t make more fuss if you was the father,” she said.  “I’d like to see Emil getting into such a stew about it.”

Philip’s mind was full of the stories he had heard of baby-farming and the ghouls who ill-treat the wretched children that selfish, cruel parents have put in their charge.

“Don’t be so silly,” said Mildred.  “That’s when you give a woman a sum down to look after a baby.  But when you’re going to pay so much a week it’s to their interest to look after it well.”

Philip insisted that Mildred should place the child with people who had no children of their own and would promise to take no other.

“Don’t haggle about the price,” he said.  “I’d rather pay half a guinea a week than run any risk of the kid being starved or beaten.”

“You’re a funny old thing, Philip,” she laughed.

To him there was something very touching in the child’s helplessness.  It was small, ugly, and querulous.  Its birth had been looked forward to with shame and anguish.  Nobody wanted it.  It was dependent on him, a stranger, for food, shelter, and clothes to cover its nakedness.

As the train started he kissed Mildred.  He would have kissed the baby too, but he was afraid she would laugh at him.

“You will write to me, darling, won’t you?  And I shall look forward to your coming back with oh! such impatience.”

“Mind you get through your exam.”

He had been working for it industriously, and now with only ten days before him he made a final effort.  He was very anxious to pass, first to save himself time and expense, for money had been slipping through his fingers during the last four months with incredible speed; and then because this examination marked the end of the drudgery:  after that the student had to do with medicine, midwifery, and surgery, the interest of which was more vivid than the anatomy and physiology with which he had been hitherto concerned.  Philip looked forward with interest to the rest of the curriculum.  Nor did he want to have to confess to Mildred that he had failed:  though the examination was difficult and the majority of candidates were ploughed at the first attempt, he knew that she would think less well of him if he did not succeed; she had a peculiarly humiliating way of showing what she thought.

Mildred sent him a postcard to announce her safe arrival, and he snatched half an hour every day to write a long letter to her.  He had always a certain shyness in expressing himself by word of mouth, but he found he could tell her, pen in hand, all sorts of things which it would have made him feel ridiculous to say.  Profiting by the discovery he poured out to her his whole heart.  He had never been able to tell her before how his adoration filled every part of him so that all his actions, all his thoughts, were touched