The thing that surprised Richard most was the ease and efficiency with which Eleanor handled Annabel—she seemed to know by instinct things that Richard could not understand—and that he could not understand how she came by.

If she reached out her hands to take Annabel, her fingers seemed, of themselves, to curve into the places where they would fit into the spineless bundle and give it support. If Richard tried to take up the bundle, his fingers fell away like the legs of the brittle crab and the bundle collapsed, incalculable and helpless.

“How do you do it?” he would say. And he would right Annabel and try to still her protests.

And Eleanor would only smile gently, and send him on some masculine errand while she soothed Annabel’s feelings in the proper way.

Richard had once watched a cat with her kittens and he had a vivid sense of the kinship of method—so had kittens always been brought into the world and tended; so they would always be—likewise babies.

It was not something that could be read in a book or taught in a school.... Eleanor grew very beautiful these days. The little upward twist left her mouth; and if it grew almost too knowing in its sense of the boundless and accumulated wisdom of ages as regards babies—that, Richard decided, was Annabel’s fault.... Really, to know how to manage a little handful like Annabel might make any one proud.

For one thing, Annabel knew exactly what she wanted.... And she usually got it. She was often disciplined on the way to it, and thwarted—but in the end she got what she wanted.

As Richard More watched Annabel’s progress through life, he thought more than once of the regal gesture with which Annabel’s mother had thrown back the Chinese coat and cast it aside for Annabel’s sake....

And now he saw Annabel! Life was often very puzzling. But Richard More had not time to spend working it out. He was too prosperous to puzzle. Whatever he put his hand to seemed to flourish. Men came to have faith in his ventures, and to watch for his investments as pointers to success. His business increased and his family increased.... William Archer came in due season, and then Claude, and then Martin, and Christine, and that was the end.

The children grew up healthy and normal, except Claude. There seemed some obscure trouble with the boy, and before he was six years old it had declared itself. Within a year, in spite of expensive doctors and care, he died. That had been their first and their only real sorrow.

It was when they came back to the house from the funeral that he told Eleanor of his second attempt to get the coat for her.... They were alone in the house. The children had been sent away during the child’s illness and had not come back.

He fancied Eleanor drooped a little as they came into the house; and his mind went out for something to comfort her.... It encountered the Chinese coat.

So, as they sat together in the house that seemed so curiously desolate and different from their usual life together, he told her of the morning he went back to Stewart’s and of his disappointment, and of how he had never quite given up hope that some day Stewart would send for him and tell him to come and get the coat.

She listened with wide, set eyes—almost like a child to a fairy-tale.

“That was very dear of you, Richard!” she said. And she smiled to him, almost as she smiled to the children, and he felt the quick tears in his eyes.

And then suddenly she had thrown herself in his arms.

“Oh, Dick, I am so lonely!” she cried.

And that was the way she came back to him.

After that, although she still guided the children and her hand was on the helm in all decisions, it was to Richard she turned for assurance.

She had come apparently to uncharted waters, and she did not try to make soundings.

And Richard More was as puzzled by her reliance on him as he had been by her wisdom with babies and with life.

It did not occur to him that in her reliance, too, there might be a kind of wisdom—not to be expounded by logic, perhaps—but deep as life.... For himself, he knew that he had not wisdom to advise any one. He simply did what he could—and when his advice prospered, he was as naively and proudly surprised as any one.

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