Her eyes went wide when she saw me standing there. “Mike!”

“Hello,” I said, kissing her. “Well? What did the doctor say? Yes or no?”

Color came into her cheeks in a gentle rush. Her eyes dropped. “Yes,” she said.

“Yes? You’re—”

She nodded. “Yes. I’m going to have the baby, Mike.”

I sank down on the cheap sofa and stared at my hands. “I don’t understand. We were so careful—”

“The way you sound, Mike, you don’t want the baby. Or me. Is that true?”

“You know it isn’t, Peggy,” I lied. “I love you. And I want the baby. But—”

“But what, Mike?”

“My wife’s sure to make trouble. She always does. You don’t know Helen the way I do, Peg.”

A ripple of anxiety passed over her smooth face. “She’ll give yon the divorce, won’t she? I mean, she wouldn’t want to hold out, Mike.”

I shook my head. “Helen’s a funny woman. Sure, she’ll give me the divorce. But she’ll stall and stall and wait around. Anything to foul me up. She’ll wait till the baby’s born. Then there’ll be the mess of finding a place where you can stay until the wedding, of getting the papers fixed up so the kid’s legitimate, of—” I stopped. “Well, it’ll all work out, I hope.”

“I hope so too, Mike.”

I glanced up, eyeing her. Her figure was still slim, inviting, with no sign of the distortion that the next few months would work on it.

“What doctor did you go to?” I asked.

“The one in Brooklyn. Like you said. I told him my name was Mrs. McAllister, like you said.” Shyly, she indicated the cheap five-and-ten wedding band on her finger and blushed again. “I didn’t want him to think—well, you know what I mean, Mike.”

“Yeah. And he said the test was positive?”

“I’m in my third month,” she said. “Definitely. I’ll have the baby some time next winter. February, most likely.”

Like hell you will, I thought to myself. But outwardly I just smiled sweetly at her as if she were my wife and not just a spare-time hobby I’d picked up along the way.

She touched the cheesy wedding band. “I’ll be getting a real one of these soon, won’t I? Mike, I love you so much—you’ll see about the divorce, won’t you? I—I want to get married to you before it starts to show. You know how I’d feel if—”

“Sure,” I said tenderly.

She was silent for a few minutes. Then, in the roundabout way she always uses to preface such things, she said, “I had a little trouble paying the doctor bill. I wonder if you could—give me a little, just to tide me over, Mike. You’d be a doll. A living doll.”