Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. 1. THE departure of Moon Chao left Kate a little blue and depressed. China seemed very far away. "How will it be with us now?" she asked herself, that evening. She had a premonition of how with the baby's coming the burden on Peter would increase. She herself would 'have to stop teaching, and expenses would mount up. She stole an anxious glance at him as he sat with his pipe and the evening paper. They had been married barely a year, yet already she understood him so much better than he did himself. "He thinks he's terribly sorry to have Moon gone," she reflected. "Yet part of him is greatly relieved to be rid of Moon Chao and settled down—right here in New York." How he loved familiar things; how slow and cautious he could be. "Suppose it grows on him," she thought, "in spite of all that I can do, and he goes on and on—right here—getting heavier and heavier." All at once a picture came to her of a Peter dull, massive, middle aged; and she felt a wave of sharp impatience. Kate was only twenty-three. She felt things suddenly like that. For a few moments, sewing rapidly, she kept her eyes upon her work. Then in a swift scrutiny they went back to her husband's face. "Heavy, stolid, dull? Not at all! That's only on the surface !" she went on, in an eager defense of this man to whom she felt she was tied for life. And she thought of the wistful, hungry Peter beneath the crust of New England reserve. "That's what I fell in love with. He's really bubbling over—with fun and dreams and oh so much—and he tries so hard to get it out. But how clumsy, awkward, sensitive!" That was one of the things in him that had appealed to her from the start. He looked so enormously tough, and yet was so defenseless. Worries could drive in on him so. What would the next years do to him? S...