"Darling, you must go to sleepsumby!" Molly would remonstrate. "And you will catch your death if you don't keep covered up!"
But the four months' old baby had been too busy in her short life learning other things to bother her head about a mere language. The business of the night was feet and feet alone. There was too much to do about those wonderful little feet for her to think of sleep. Finally Molly gave up. She closed the windows, as too much fresh air on bare feet and legs might not be best and already the little limbs were icy cold. Then she kindled a fire in the grate, the furnace not yet having been started, and gave herself up to a night of sleeplessness. Early in the action, Edwin had been banished to the guest chamber, as he must get sleep no matter what happened, for he had a busy day ahead of him.
Toward morning little Mildred mastered her pedagogy, as her father had called it, and then she dropped off into a deep and peaceful sleep. The weary Molly slept, too.
Before he went to his lectures, Edwin crept into the room to look at his sleeping treasures. The chubby baby still had a toe clasped in her hand but from very weariness had fallen over on her side and was covered up all but the pink foot, which was asserting itself in the remarkable position that only the young can take. Molly looked very pale and tired but was sleeping peacefully. Edwin smiled at them. He had given the green maid from the Emerald Isle strict orders not to awaken them. He devoutly hoped that Molly would not know what a very mean breakfast he had endeavored to choke down; burnt bacon and underdone biscuit washed down with very weak coffee and flanked by eggs that had been cooked too long and not long enough, thereby undergoing that process that the chemist tells us is of all things the most indigestible: half hard and half soft. The burnt bacon had been cold and the underdone biscuit still cooking, seemingly, when the poor young husband and father had tried to nourish himself on them.
He had rather hoped when Molly once got back to Wellington that his food would be better; no doubt it would as soon as she, poor girl, could get rested up. He was thankful, indeed, now that she was asleep and tiptoed out of the room and house without making a sound.