that were possible. She had laughed and
hugged his worried old head tight against her breast.

But his refusal to face facts about her musical career was another thing
altogether. Once more he had, patently and rather pitiably, evaded the
subject of her going seriously to work. Did he think that she could go
on indefinitely parading a parlor accomplishment for his society
friends,--singing nice little English songs for Wallace Hood? It was too
ridiculous! That hadn't been their understanding when she married him.

What she had been sure of last night as never before, she had tried down
there in the dining-room to convey to him; that her powers were ripe,
were crying out for use. She had failed simply because he had refused to
see what she was driving at. It was just another form of jealousy really,
she supposed.

She was not an introspective person, but this, clearly, was something
that wanted thinking over. It was to "think" that she went out for the
walk. Only, being Paula, the rhythm of her stride, the sparkle of the
spring air, the stream of sharp new-minted sensations incessantly
assailing eye and ear, soon swamped her problem; sunk it beneath the
level of consciousness altogether. Long before ten o'clock when she came
swinging along Dearborn Avenue toward her husband's house, she had
"walked off" her perplexities.

A block from the house she found herself overtaking a man in uniform and
slackened her pace a little in order not to pass him. There was something
unmilitary about the look of him that mildly amused her. It was not that
he slouched nor shuffled nor that he was ill-made, though he was probably
one of those unfortunates whom issue uniforms never fit. He carried a
little black leather satchel, and it broke over Paula that here perhaps
was Lucile's piano tuner. She half formed the intention to stay away
another hour or two until he should have had time to finish. But he
interfered with that plan by stopping in front of the house and looking
at it as if making up his mind whether to go in.

It was an odd look he had, but distinctly an engaging one. He was not
criticizing the architecture, if so it could be called, of the
house-front. Yet there was a sort of comfortable detachment about him
which precluded the belief that it was a mere paralyzing shyness that
held him there.

Paula abandoned her intention of walking by. She stopped instead as she
came up to him and said, "Are you coming in here? If you