us likes to be
persistently overrated, you know."

"I don't think the less of you for being angry when you had a just
cause, as I know you must have had."

"It's not the being angry; it's the losing control."

"But you didn't."

"Didn't I?" A short, grim laugh testified to Burns's opinion on this
point. "Ask that woman I put on the train to-night. Jord, on her arm is
a black bruise where I gripped her when she lied to me; I gripped her--a
woman. You might as well know. Now--keep on respecting me if you can."

"But I do," said Jordan King.

CHAPTER XIV

A STRANGE DAY

"Len, will you go for a day in the woods with me?"

Ellen Burns looked up from the old mahogany secretary which had been
hers in the southern-home days. She was busily writing letters, but the
request, from her busy husband, was so unusual that it arrested her
attention. Her glance travelled from his face to the window and back
again.

"I know it's pretty frosty," he acknowledged, "but the sun is bright,
and I'll build you a windbreak that'll keep you snug. I'm aching for a
day off--with you."

"Artful man! You know I can't resist when you put it that way, though I
ought not to leave this desk for two hours. Give me half an hour, and
tell me what you want for lunch."

"Cynthia and I'll take care of that. She's putting up the stuff now,
subject to your approval."

He was off to the kitchen, and Ellen finished the note she had begun,
put away the writing materials and letters, and ran up to her room. By
the end of the stipulated half hour she was down again, trimly clad in a
suit of brown tweeds, with a big coat for extra warmth and a close hat
and veil for breeze resistance.

"That's my girl! You never look prettier to my eyes than when you are
dressed like this. It's the real comrade look you have then, and I feel
as if we were shoulder to shoulder, ready for anything that might come."

"Just as if it weren't always that," she said in merry reproach as she
took her place beside him and the car rolled off.

"It's always great fun to go off with you unexpectedly like this," she
went on presently. "It seems so long since we've done it. It's been such
a busy year. Is everybody getting well to-day, that you can manage a
whole day?"

"All but one, and he doesn't need me just now. I could keep busy, of
course, but I got a sudden hankering for a day all alone with you in the
woods; and after that idea once struck me I'd have made way