in a small voice. Fortunately she saw the ridiculousness of what she had said herself before the constrained note of her voice reached her husband, and began, a little nervously, to laugh at herself. So that passed off all right.

"Will life be just one succession of hoping things pass off all right?" she wondered. And she did wish Francis wasn't so scornful about all the things Logan said. For Logan, in spite of his mysterious disability, was very brilliant; he wrote essays for real magazines that you had to pay thirty-five cents for, and when Marjorie said she knew him people were always very respectful and impressed. Marjorie had been brought up to respect such things very much, herself, in a pretty Westchester suburb, where celebrities were things which passed through in clouds of glory, lecturing for quite as much as the club felt it could afford. A celebrity who let you talk to him, nay, seemed delighted when you let him talk to you, couldn't be as negligible as Francis seemed to think him. . . . Francis didn't seem as if he had ever read anything. . . . It was a harmless question to ask, at least.

"What did you read, over there?" she asked him.

"We read anything we could get hold of that would take our minds," was the answer, rather grimly. Then, more lightly, "When I wasn't reading detective stories I was studying books on forestry. Did you know you had married a forester bold, Marge?"

"Of course I remembered you said that was what you did," she answered, relieved that the talk was veering away, for one moment, from themselves.

"Poor little girl, you haven't had a chance to know very much about me," he said tenderly. "Well, I know a lot more about it than I did when I went away. Oh, the trees in France, dear! It's worse to think of the trees than of the people, I think sometimes. I suppose that's because they always meant a lot to me—very much as a jeweler would feel badly about all the spoons the Crown Prince took home with him. . . . Anyway, they wanted me to stay over there and do reforestation. Big chances. But I didn't feel as if I could stay away from little old New York—naturally Marge had nothing to do with it—another hour. Would you have liked to go to Italy and watch me re-forest, Marjorie?"

Marjorie's "Oh, no!" was very fervent. She also found herself thinking stealthily that even any one as efficient as Francis could not reforest the city of New York, and that therefore any position he had would very likely let her off. Maybe he might go very soon.

With this thought in her mind she led the way up the three flights of stairs to the tiny apartment she and Lucille Strong shared. If Francis had not spoken as they reached the door she might have carried it through. But just as she fitted her key in the door he did speak, behind her, an arm about her.

"In another minute you and I will be alone together; in our own home—my wife——"

He took the key gently from her hand; he unlocked the door, and drew her in, with his arms around her. He pushed the door to behind them, and bent down to kiss her again, very tenderly and reverently. And in that instant Marjorie's self-control broke.

CHAPTER II

"Oh, please don't touch me, just for a minute!" she exclaimed.
"Please—please—just stop a minute!"

She did not realize that her tone was very much that of a patient addressing a dentist. Francis's arms dropped, and he looked at her, all the light going out of his face, and showing its weary lines. He closed the door entirely, carefully. He went mechanically over to a chair and sat down on it, always with that queer carefulness; he laid his cap beside him, and looked at Marjorie, crouched against the door.

"Please come over here and sit down," he said very courteously, but with the boyishness gone from his voice even more completely than Marjorie had wished.

She came very meekly and sat opposite him, with a little queer cold feeling around her heart.

"Please look at me," he asked gently. She lifted her blue eyes miserably to his, and tried to smile. But unconsciously she shrank a little as she did so, and he saw it.

"I won't touch you—not until you want me to," he began. "What's the matter, Marjorie? Is it nerves, or are you afraid of me, or——"

"It—it was just your coming so suddenly," she lied miserably. "It upset me. That was all."

In her mind there was fixed firmly the one thing, that she mustn't be a coward, she must go through with it, she must pretend well enough to make Francis think she felt the way she ought to. The Francis of pre-war times would have been fooled; but this man had been judging men and events that took as keen a mind as seeing through a frightened girl. He looked at her musingly, his face never changing. She rose and came over to him and put her hand on his shoulder. She even managed to laugh.

"Do you mind my being upset?" she asked.

"No," he said, "if that's all it is. But you have a particular kind of terror about you that I don't like. Or I think you have."

She took her hand away, hurt by the harshness of his voice—then, seeing his face, understood that he was not knowingly harsh. She had hurt him terribly by that one unguarded moment, and she would have to work very hard to put it out of sight.

"I—I haven't any terror——" she began to say.

He made himself smile a little at that.

"You mustn't have," he said. "We'll sit down on the davenport over there that Lucille's grandmother gave her for a wedding-present—you see how well I remember the news about all the furniture? And we'll talk about it all quietly."

"There's nothing to talk about," said Marjorie desperately. She went obediently over to the davenport and sat down by him.

"You were upset at seeing me?" he began.

"It was—well, it was so sudden!" dimpled Marjorie, quoting the tag with the sudden whimsicality which even death would probably find her using.

"And I still seem—do I seem like a strange person to you, dear?" he asked wistfully. "You don't seem strange to me, you know. You seem like the wife I love."

The worst of it was that when Francis was gay and like a playmate, as he had been at their luncheon before Logan came, she could feel that things were nearly all right. But when he spoke as he was speaking now the terror of him came back worse than ever.

"No. No, you don't seem strange at all," she said. "Why should you?" But while she spoke the words she knew they were not true. She looked at him, and his face was like a stranger's face. She had known other men as well as she had known her husband, except for the brief while when she had promised to marry him. She took stock of his features; the straight, clearly marked black brows under the mark the cap made on his forehead; the rather high cheekbones, the clear-cut nose and chin, the little line of black mustache that did not hide his hard-set and yet sensitive lips; the square, rather long jaw—"He'll have deep lines at the sides of his mouth in a few more years," she thought, and—"He's much darker than I remembered him. But he has no color under the brown. I thought he had a good deal of color . . ." She appraised his face, not liking it altogether, as if she had never seen it before. His hand, long, narrow, muscular, burned even more deeply than his face, and with a fine black down lying close over it, seemed a hand she had never seen or been touched by before. But that was his wedding-ring—her wedding-ring—on the thin third