r, far out of his real life as if she had indeed been a child.

One evening he came in to sit by her,--her convalescence had been a long
and dragging one,--and she had paused in the midst of telling him
something to await an answer. None came. She spoke again, and raised
herself to look. Then she saw that even within that brief space he had
fallen asleep, as a man may who is thoroughly exhausted. Thoroughly
exhausted! Everything proclaimed it--his attitude, grimly grotesque in
the dim light, one leg stretched out half in front of the other, as he
had dropped into the seat, his relaxed arms hanging down, his head
resting sidewise against the back of the chair, with the face sharply
upturned. The shadows lay in the hollows under his cheek-bones and in
those lines that marked his temples. Divested of color and the
transforming play of expression, he looked strangely old, terribly
lifeless. He slept without moving,--almost, it seemed, without
breathing,--while Lois, with a new dread, watched him with frightened,
dilated, fascinated eyes. How had he grown like this? What unnoticed
change had been at work? She called him again, but he did not hear; she
stretched out her arm, but he was just beyond reach. Suddenly it seemed
to her that he was dead, and that she could never reach him again; an
icy hand seemed to have been laid on her heart. What if never, never,
never----

Just then he opened his eyes and sat up, saying naturally, "Did you
speak?"

"Oh, you frightened me so! Don't go to sleep like that again," said
Lois, with a shaking voice. "Come here."

He came and knelt down by her, and she pressed his cheek close to hers
with a rush of painful emotion. "Why, you mustn't get worked up over a
little thing like that," he objected lightly, going out of the room
afterward with a reassuring smile at her, while she gazed after him with
strangely awakened eyes. For the first time in months, she thought of
him without any thought of benefit to herself.

The next day the neighbor sent her over the book; the title arrested her
attention oddly--"The Woman's Kingdom." Another phrase correlated with
it in her memory--"Queen of the Home." That was supposed to be woman's
domain, where she was the sovereign power; there she was helper,
sustainer, director, the dear dispenser of favors. The woman's kingdom,
queen of the home. Gradually the words led her down long lanes of
retrospect, led by the rose-leaf touch of the baby's fingers; _t