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or nestle in his arms.
‘It’s all very fine for you,’ said Mildred. ‘You don’t have
any of the disagreeable part of it. How would you like being
kept awake for an hour in the middle of the night because
her ladyship wouldn’t go to sleep?’
Philip remembered all sorts of things of his childhood
which he thought he had long forgotten. He took hold of
the baby’s toes.
‘This little pig went to market, this little pig stayed at
home.’
When he came home in the evening and entered the sit-
ting-room his first glance was for the baby sprawling on the
floor, and it gave him a little thrill of delight to hear the
child’s crow of pleasure at seeing him. Mildred taught her
to call him daddy, and when the child did this for the first
time of her own accord, laughed immoderately.
‘I wonder if you’re that stuck on baby because she’s mine,’
asked Mildred, ‘or if you’d be the same with anybody’s
baby.’
‘I’ve never known anybody else’s baby, so I can’t say,’ said
Philip.
Towards the end of his second term as in-patients’ clerk a
piece of good fortune befell Philip. It was the middle of July.
He went one Tuesday evening to the tavern in Beak Street
and found nobody there but Macalister. They sat together,
chatting about their absent friends, and after a while Ma-
calister said to him:
‘Oh, by the way, I heard of a rather good thing today, New
Kleinfonteins; it’s a gold mine in Rhodesia. If you’d like to