inspiration. Promise to let me help you all I can.”

“You always help me.”

“Ah, no, I don’t; I feel it, though you may not.” She paused, and went on again with a tremulous note in her voice: “Justin, I miss you so much sometimes; there are days and days when I feel as if I hadn’t seen you at all!”

“You see all there is of me,” said Justin tersely. “How many times a year do I go out of an evening without you?”

“Yes, I know that; but when I am alone all day with the children and the servants, I think of so many things that I want to say to you when you come home, and then you are tired, or sleepy, or want to read, and I don’t get any chance at all. You never ask me anything, or notice when I don’t feel well; yesterday I had such a headache I could hardly sit up, and you never noticed. Do you think, Justin, that you could feel ill and I not know it?”

“No, I suppose not,” said Justin. “But I’m afraid you’ll have another headache to-morrow if you sit up any longer, Lois.”

“No, I will not!” She tossed her head gayly, and also tossed away a bright tear that was ready to fall. Her husband hated to see her cry, it filled him with a cold and unreasoning wrath at which she blindly wondered but was forced to accept as a fact. She knew that she had broken up many happy hours by weeping inopportunely.

She tried to speak evenly as she said: “I didn’t mean that to sound as if I were complaining. I think and think how I can make things—different.”

She pushed her white, blue-veined feet, in their pink slippers, nearer to the blaze, and he put his hand over them protectingly. Although she had been married for nearly eight years, she had not lost a certain girlish trick of modesty, and blushed sweetly at his action and his gaze.

It was a remarkable thing that while marriage after any term of years seemed as though it could be only an antique and commonplace thing, it still held for them the essence of novelty; they were only beginning to act in the great drama, and not at all sure of their parts in it yet. To live one’s own life is a matter of such poignant and absorbing interest that it insensibly creates an individual atmosphere which obscures the large known phenomena of nature.

Lois remembered once looking upon a man who had lost his wife after ten years of wedded happiness, and rather wondering at the pity bestowed upon him. Ten years! Why, it seemed like half a century—life must be nearly over, anyway. She was beginning to realize now, with a sort of wonder, that, as the years lengthened, one’s inner limit of youth lengthened also; even after a decade they might still think of themselves as young married people with a future all to come.

The tender proprietorship of Justin’s caress was more comforting to Lois than words. They both sat dreamily watching the blue pinnacle of flame as they rose from the red heart of the fire, her arm across his shoulders as he leaned backward, together, yet each with a mind preoccupied with divergent claims.

The fitful light revealed a tiny apartment, half sitting-room, half nursery, crowded with many things, the overflow of a small household. It was not in the least as Lois would have liked it to be, but she always felt that it was only a temporary arrangement. There was hardly space to walk between the wicker chairs, the sewing-table, and the covered box by the window that served both as a seat and as a receptacle for toys—a doll’s cradle and a horse on wheels taking up two of the corners by the window. Across the back of one chair hung a pair of diminutive stockings, and a basket filled with work stood on the table. The utter domesticity of the room was hardly relieved by an unframed engraving of the Madonna della Sedia over the wooden mantelpiece, with a heterogeneous