Danner tottered into the street and executed his errand. The doctor smiled cheerfully. “Just beginning? I’ll be over this afternoon.”

“But—good Lord—you can’t leave her like—”

“Nonsense.”

He came home and found his wife dusting. He shook his head. “Get Mrs. Nolan,” she said. Then she threw herself on the bed again.

Mrs. Nolan, the nearest neighbour, wife of Professor Nolan and mother of four children, was delighted. This particular Christmas was going to be a day of some excitement. She prepared hot water and bustled with unessential occupation. Danner sat prostrate in the parlour. He had done it. He had done more—and that would be known later. Perhaps it would fail. He hoped it would fail. He wrung his hands. The concept of another person in his house had not yet occurred to him. Birth was his wife’s sickness—until it was over.

The doctor arrived after Danner had made his third trip. Mrs. Nolan prepared lunch. “I love to cook in other people’s kitchens,” she said. He wanted to strike her. Curious, he thought. At three-thirty the industry of the doctor and Mrs. Nolan increased and the silence of the two, paradoxically, increased with it.

Then the early twilight fell. Mrs. Danner lay with her lank black hair plastered to her brow. She did not moan. Pain twisted and convulsed her. Downstairs Danner sat and sweated. A cry—his wife’s. Another—unfamiliar. Scurrying feet on the bare parts of the floor. He looked up. Mrs. Nolan leaned over the stair well.

“It’s a boy, Mr. Danner. A beautiful boy. And husky. You never saw such a husky baby.”

“It ought to be,” he said. They found him later in the back yard, prancing on the snow with weird, ungainly steps. A vacant smile lighted his features. They didn’t blame him.

III

Calm and quiet held their negative sway over the Danner ménage for an hour, and then there was a disturbed fretting that developed into a lusty bawl. The professor passed a fatigued hand over his brow. He was unaccustomed to the dissonances of his offspring. Young Hugo—they had named him after a maternal uncle—had attained the age of one week without giving any indication of unnaturalness.

That is not quite true. He was as fleshy as most healthy infants, but the flesh was more than normally firm. He was inordinately active. His eyes had been gray but, already, they gave promise of the inkiness they afterwards exhibited. He was born with a quantity of black hair—hair so dark as to be nearly blue. Abednego Danner, on seeing it, exercised the liberty which all husbands take, and investigated rumours of his wife’s forbears with his most secret thoughts. The principal rumour was that one of her lusty Covenanter grandsires had been intrigued by a squaw to the point of forgetting his Psalms and recalling only the Song of Solomon.