nd white, drawn face opposite
stopped it just in time.

"Why, Billy--darling!" he murmured instead.

It was Billy's turn to change. All the anger melted away before the
dismayed tenderness in those dear eyes and the grieved hurt in that dear
voice.

"Well, you--you--I--" Billy began to cry.

It was all right then, of course, for the next minute she was crying on
Bertram's big, broad shoulder; and in the midst of broken words, kisses,
gentle pats, and inarticulate croonings, the Big, Bad Quarrel, that had
been all ready to materialize, faded quite away into nothingness.

"I didn't have such an awfully good time, anyhow," avowed Bertram, when
speech became rational. "I'd rather have been home with you."

"Nonsense!" blinked Billy, valiantly. "Of course you had a good time;
and it was perfectly right you should have it, too! And I--I hope you'll
have it again."

"I sha'n't," emphasized Bertram, promptly, "--not and leave you!"

Billy regarded him with adoring eyes.

"I'll tell you; we'll have 'em come here," she proposed gayly.

"Sure we will," agreed Bertram.

"Yes; sure we will," echoed Billy, with a contented sigh. Then, a little
breathlessly, she added: "Anyhow, I'll know--where you are. I won't
think you're--dead!"

"You--blessed--little-goose!" scolded Bertram, punctuating each word
with a kiss.

Billy drew a long sigh.

"If this is a quarrel I'm going to have them often," she announced
placidly.

"Billy!" The young husband was plainly aghast.

"Well, I am--because I like the making-up," dimpled Billy, with a
mischievous twinkle as she broke from his clasp and skipped ahead up the
stairway.

CHAPTER VIII. BILLY CULTIVATES A "COMFORTABLE INDIFFERENCE"

The next morning, under the uncompromising challenge of a bright sun,
Billy began to be uneasily suspicious that she had been just a bit
unreasonable and exacting the night before. To make matters worse she
chanced to run across a newspaper criticism of a new book bearing the
ominous title: "When the Honeymoon Wanes A Talk to Young Wives."

Such a title, of course, attracted her supersensitive attention at once;
and, with a curiously faint feeling, she picked up the paper and began
to read.

As the most of the criticism was taken up with quotations from the book,
it was such sentences as these that met her startled eyes:

"Perhaps the first test comes when the young wife awakes to the
realization that while her husband loves her very