That night the stars, dim and distant, were scattered like specks of frost on some wide, blue window-pane. At intervals a shiver of wheels crunching the resistant snow stirred the lethargy of the street, and at times a rumble accentuated by the chill of winter mounted gradually, and passed on in diminishing vibrations. Within, a single light, burning scantily, diffused through the room the drowsiness of a spell. In the bed was Justine, her eyes dilated, her face attenuated and pinched. One hand that lay on the coverlid was clinched so tightly that the nails must have entered the flesh. Presently she moaned, and a trim little woman issued from a corner with the noiseless wariness of a rat. As she passed before the night-light, the silhouette of a giantess, fabulously obese, jumped out and vanished from the wall. For a moment she scrutinized her charge, burrowing into her, as it were, with shrewd yet kindly eyes. Again a moan escaped the sufferer, the wail of one whose agony is lancinating—one that ascended in crescendos and terminated in a cry of such utter helplessness, and therewith of such insistent pain, that the nurse caught the hand that lay on the coverlid, and unlocking the fingers stroked and held it in her own. "There, dear heart—there, I know."

Ah, yes, she knew very well. She had not passed ten years of her existence tending women in travail for the fun of it. And as she took Justine's hand and stroked it, she knew that in a little while the agony, acuter still, would lower her charge into that vestibule of death where Life appears. Whether or not Justine was to cross that silent threshold, whether happily she would find it barred, whether it would greet and keep her and hold her there, whether indeed it would let the child go free, an hour would tell, or two at most.

But there were preparations to be made. The nurse left the bed and moved out into the hall. In a room near by, Mistrial, occupied with some advertisements in the Post, sat companioned by a physician who was reading a book which he had written himself. At the footfall of the nurse the latter left the room. Presently he returned. "Everything is going nicely," he announced, and placidly resumed his seat.

It was the fourth time in two hours that he had made that same remark. Mistrial said nothing. He was gazing through the paper he held at the wall opposite, and out of it into the future beyond.

Since that day, the previous spring, on which he had set out to visit a relative, many things had happened, yet but few that were of importance to him. On his return from the trip, during one fleeting second, for the first time since he had known Justine, it seemed to him that she avoided his eyes. To this, in other circumstances, he would have given no thought whatever; as matters were, it made him feel that his excursion should not be regarded as time ill-spent. Whether it had been wholly serviceable to his project, he could not at the time decide. He waited, however, very patiently, but he seldom waited within the apartment walls. At that period he developed a curious facility for renewing relations with former friends. Once he took a run to Chicago with an Englishman he had known in Japan; and once, with the brother of a lady who had married into the Baxter branch of the house of Mistrial, he went on a fishing trip to Canada. These people he did not bring to call on his wife. He seemed to act as though solitude were grateful to her. Save Mrs. Metuchen, Thorold at that time was her only visitor, and the visits of that gentleman Mistrial encouraged in every way that he could devise. Through meetings that, parenthetically, were more frequent on the stair or in the hallway than anywhere else, the two men, through sheer force of circumstances, dropped into an exchange of salutations—remarks about the weather, reciprocal inquiries on the subject of each other's health, which, wholly formal on Thorold's part, were from Mistrial always civil and aptly put. After all, was he not the host? and was it not for him to show particular courtesy to anyone whom his wife received?

To her, meanwhile, his attitude was little short of perfection itself. He was considerate, foresighted, and unobtrusive—a course of conduct which frightened her a little. Two or three months after he had struck her in the face she made—À propos of nothing at all—an announcement which brought a trace of color to her cheeks.

The following afternoon he happened to be entering the house as Dr. Thorold was leaving it. Instead of greeting him in the nice and amiable fashion which he had adopted, and which Thorold had ended by accepting as a matter of course, he halted and looked at the physician through half-closed eyes. Thorold nodded, cavalierly enough it is true, and was about to pass on; but this Mistrial prevented. He planted himself squarely in his way, and stuck his hands in his pockets.

"Mrs. Mistrial has no further need of you," he said. "Send your bill to me."

He spoke from the tips of his lips, with the air and manner of one dismissing a lackey. At the moment nothing pertinent could have occurred to Thorold. He stared at Mistrial, dumbly perplexed, and plucked at his cuff. Mistrial nodded as who should say, "Put that in your pipe;" and before Thorold recovered his self-possession he had passed up the stairs and on and out of sight.

It was then that season in which July has come and is going. The city was hot; torrid at noonday, sultry and enervating at night. Fifth Avenue and the adjacent precincts were empty. Each one of the brown-stone houses had a Leah-like air of desertion. The neighborhood of Madison and of Union Squares was peopled by men with large eyes and small feet, by women so deftly painted that, like Correggio, they could have exclaimed, "Anch' io son pittore." In brief, the Southern invasion had begun, and New York had ceased to be habitable.

But Newport has charms of its own; and to that lovely city by the water Mistrial induced his wife; and there, until summer had departed, and autumn too, they rested and waited. During those months he was careful of her: so pleasantly so, so studious of what she did and of what she ate, that for the first time since the honeymoon she might have, had she tried, felt at ease with him again. But there were things that prevented this—faith destroyed and the regret of it. Oh, indeed she had regrets in plenty; some even for her father; and, unknown to Mistrial, once or twice she wrote him such letters as a daughter may write. She had never been in sympathy with him; as a child he had coerced her needlessly; when she was older he had preached; later, divining that lack of sympathy, he had striven through kindlier ways to counteract it. But he had failed; and Justine, aiding in the endeavor, had failed as well. When father and child do not stand hand-in-hand a fibre is wanting that should be there.

In December Mistrial and his wife returned to town. A date was approaching, and there was the layette to be prepared. Hour after hour Justine's fingers sped. The apartment became a magazine of swaddling-clothes. One costume in particular, a worsted sack that was not much larger than a coachman's glove, duplicated and repeated itself in varying and tender hues. Occasionally Mistrial would pick one up and examine it furtively. To his vagabond fancy it suggested a bag in which gold would be.

But now the hour was reached. And as Mistrial sat staring into the future, the goal to which he had striven kept looming nearer and ever nearer yet. Only the day before he had learned that Dunellen was failing. And what a luxury it would be to him when the old man died and the will was read! Such a luxury did it appear, that unconsciously he manifested his contentment by that sound the glutton makes at the mention of delicious food.

His companion—the physician—turned and nodded. "I know what you are thinking about," he announced; and with the rapt expression of a seer, half to Mistrial, half to the ceiling, "It is always the case," he continued; "I never knew a father yet that did not wonder what the child would be; and the mothers, oh! the mothers! Some of them know all about it beforehand: they want a girl, and a girl it will be; or they want a boy, and a boy they are to have. I remember one dear, good soul who was so positive she was to have a boy that she had all the linen marked with the name she had chosen for him. H'm. It turned out to be twins—both girls. And I remember—"

But Mistrial had ceased to listen. He was off again discounting the inheritance in advance—discounting, too, the diabolism of his revenge. The latter, indeed, was unique, and withal so grateful, that now the consummation was at hand it fluttered his pulse like wine. He had ravened when first he learned the tenour of the will, and his soul had been bitter; but no sooner had this thing occurred to him than it resolved itself into a delight. To his disordered fancy its provisions held both vitriol and opopanax—the one for Thorold, the other for himself.

The doctor meanwhile was running on as doctors do. "Yes," Mistrial heard him say, "she was most unhappy; no woman likes a rival, and when that rival is her own maid, matters are not improved. For my part, the moment I saw how delicate she was, I thought, though I didn't dare to say so, I thought her husband had acted with great forethought. The maid was strong as an ox, and in putting her in the same condition as his wife he had simply and solely supplied her with a wet-nurse. But then, at this time particularly, women are so unreasonable. Not your good lady—a sweeter disposition—"

Whatever encomium he intended to make remained unfinished. From the room beyond a cry filtered; he turned hastily and disappeared. The cry subsided; but presently, as though in the interval the sufferer had found new strength or new torture, it rose more stridently than before. And as the rumor of it augmented and increased, a phrase of the physician's returned to Mistrial. "Everything is going very nicely," he told himself, and began to pace the floor.

A fraction of an hour passed, a second, and a third. The cry now had changed singularly; it had lost its penetrating volume, it had sunk into the rasping moan of one dreaming in a fever. Suddenly that ceased, the silence was complete, and Mistrial, a trifle puzzled, moved out into the hall. There he caught again the murmur of her voice. This time she was talking very rapidly, in a continuous flow of words. From where he stood Mistrial could not hear what she was saying, and he groped on tip-toe down the hall. As he reached the door of the room in which she was, the sweet and heavy odor of chloroform came out and met him there; but still the flow of words continued uninterruptedly, one after the other, with the incoherence of a nightmare monologuing in a corpse. Then, without transition, in the very middle of a word, a cry of the supremest agony rang out, drowning another, which was but a vague complaint.

"It's a boy," the nurse exclaimed.

And Justine through a rift of consciousness caught and detained the speech. "So much the better," she moaned; "he will never give birth."