“Is he interested in them?” asked Honora.

“You dear!” cried Lily, “you’ll be the death of me.  Lula, Honora wants to know whether Trixy is interested in children.”

Mrs. Chandos, in the act of lighting a cigarette, smiled sweetly.

“Apparently he is,” she said.

“It’s time he were, if he’s ever going to be,” said Honora, just as sweetly.

Everybody laughed but Mrs. Chandos, who began to betray an intense interest in some old lace in the corner of the room.

“I bought it for nothing, my dear,” said Mrs. Dallam, but she pinched Honora’s arm delightedly.  “How wicked of you!” she whispered, “but it serves her right.”

In the midst of the discussion of clothes and house rents and other people’s possessions, interspersed with anecdotes of a kind that was new to Honora, Sidney Dallam appeared at the door and beckoned to her.

“How silly of you, Sid!” exclaimed his wife; “of course she doesn’t want to go.”

“Indeed I do,” protested Honora, rising with alacrity and following her host up the stairs.  At the end of a hallway a nurse, who had been reading beside a lamp, got up smilingly and led the way on tiptoe into the nursery, turning on a shaded electric light.  Honora bent over the crib.  The child lay, as children will, with his little yellow head resting on his arm.  But in a moment, as she stood gazing at him, he turned and opened his eyes and smiled at her, and she stooped and kissed him.

“Where’s Daddy?” he demanded.

“We’ve waked him!” said Honora, remorsefully.

“Daddy,” said the child, “tell me a story.”

The nurse looked at Dallam reproachfully, as her duty demanded, and yet she smiled.  The noise of laughter reached them from below.

“I didn’t have any to-night,” the child pleaded.

“I got home late,” Dallam explained to Honora, and, looking at the nurse, pleaded in his turn; “just one.”

“Just a tiny one,” said the child.

“It’s against all rules, Mr. Dallam,” said the nurse, “but—­he’s been very lonesome to-day.”

Dallam sat down on one side of him, Honora on the other.

“Will you go to sleep right away if I do, Sid?” he asked.

The child shut his eyes very tight.

“Like that,” he promised.

It was not the Sidney Dallam of the counting-room who told that story, and Honora listened with strange sensations which she did not attempt to define.

“I used to be fond of that one when I was a youngster,” he explained apologetically to her as they went out, and little Sid had settled himself obediently on the pillow once more.  “It was when I dreamed,” he added, “of less prosaic occupations than the stock market.”

Sidney Dallam had dreamed!

Although Lily Dallam had declared that to leave her house before midnight was to insult her, it was half-past eleven when Honora and her husband reached home.  He halted smilingly in her doorway as she took off her wrap and laid it over a chair.