rtram. Bertram did not wish to take a walk.
He was hungry. He wanted his dinner; and he wanted, too, his old home
with his new wife flitting about the rooms as he had pictured this first
evening together. He wanted William, of course. Certainly he wanted
William; but if William would insist on running away and sitting on
park benches in this ridiculous fashion, he ought to take the
consequences--until to-morrow.

Five, ten, fifteen minutes passed. Up one path and down another trudged
the anxious-eyed Billy and her increasingly impatient husband. Then when
the fifteen weary minutes had become a still more weary half-hour, the
bonds Bertram had set on his temper snapped.

"Billy," he remonstrated despairingly, "do, please, come home! Don't you
see how highly improbable it is that we should happen on William if we
walked like this all night? He might move--change his seat--go home,
even. He probably has gone home. And surely never before did a bride
insist on spending the first evening after her return tramping up and
down a public park for hour after hour like this, looking for any man.
_Won't_ you come home?"

But Billy had not even heard. With a glad little cry she had darted to
the side of the humped-up figure of a man alone on a park bench just
ahead of them.

"Uncle William! Oh, Uncle William, how could you?" she cried, dropping
herself on to one end of the seat and catching the man's arm in both her
hands.

"Yes, how could you?" demanded Bertram, with just a touch of irritation,
dropping himself on to the other end of the seat, and catching the man's
other arm in his one usable hand.

The bent shoulders and bowed head straightened up with a jerk.

"Well, well, bless my soul! If it isn't our little bride," cried Uncle
William, fondly. "And the happy bridegroom, too. When did you get home?"

"We haven't got home," retorted Bertram, promptly, before his wife could
speak. "Oh, we looked in at the door an hour or so back; but we didn't
stay. We've been hunting for you ever since."

"Nonsense, children!" Uncle William spoke with gay cheeriness; but he
refused to meet either Billy's or Bertram's eyes.

"Uncle William, how could you do it?" reproached Billy, again.

"Do what?" Uncle William was plainly fencing for time.

"Leave the house like that?"

"Ho! I wanted a change."

"As if we'd believe that!" scoffed Billy.

"All right; let's call it you've had the change, then," laughed Bertram,
"and we'll send