! the nerve of it!"

"They threatened to close up your factory, Charles?" Cicily exclaimed,
astonished and angry. "But you own the Hamilton factory. What have they
to do with it? The impudence of them!"

"Yes, I own the factory, all right," the husband agreed. "But, you
see--" Hamilton broke off abruptly, and was silent for a moment. When he
spoke again, the liveliness was gone from his voice: it was become
quietly patronizing. "Oh, let's forget it, dear. I must be going dotty.
I'll be talking business with you, the first thing I know."

"I only wish you would!" Cicily answered, with a note of pleading in her
tones.

"Nonsense!" was the gruff exclamation. "The idea of talking business
with you. That would be a joke, wouldn't it?" He spoke banteringly, with
no perception of the gravity in his wife's desire to share in this phase
of his life. But he looked up from the papers after a moment into his
wife's face. She had turned from him, and then had reclined wearily in
the chair opposite him, whence she had been staring at him with a
tormenting feeling of impotence. The expression on her face was such
that Hamilton realized her distress, without having any clue to its
cause.

"Now, sweetheart, what's wrong?" he questioned. He was half-sympathetic
over her apparent misery, half-annoyed.

Cicily, with the intuitive sensitiveness of a woman to recognize a
lover's hostile feeling beneath the spoken words, was acutely conscious
of the annoyance; she ignored the modicum of sympathy. To conceal her
hurt, she had resort to a fictitious gaiety that was ill calculated,
however, to deceive, for the stress of her disappointment was very
great.

"The matter with me?" she repeated, with an assumption of surprise.
"Why, the matter with me is that I'm so happy--that's all!"

"Cicily!" Now, at last, the husband was both shocked and grieved over
his wife's mood.

"Yes, that's it--happy!" the suffering girl repeated. "Why, I'm so
happy--just so happy--that I could scream!"

Hamilton leaned forward in his chair, to regard his wife scrutinizingly.
He was filled with alarm over the nervous, almost hysterical, condition
in which he now beheld her.

"Cicily, are you well?" he asked. There was a distinct quaver of fear in
his voice. "You look--strange, somehow."

"Oh, not at all!" came the flippant retort. "It's merely that you
haven't really taken a good look at me lately--until just this minute.
So, of course, I'd look a bit stra