de of glass," or, "the roof of this carriage is flat,
it is made of wood."

Suddenly his wife buried her face in her muff, and her shoulders were
convulsed. . . .

Love and contrition possessed him on the instant. He eased his husky
throat, and the dreaded, interminable conversation began--

"What are you crying for, my dear?" said he.

Her voice, smothered by the fur, replied--

"I am not crying, darling," said she, "I am only laughing."

III

He got stiffly up from his seat before the fire--

"Be hanged," said he, "if I wait any longer for her. If she doesn't
please to come in before this hour let her stop out." He stared into
the fire for a few moments--"Let her go to Jericho," said he, and he
tramped up to bed.

They had been married just six months, after, as he put it, the hardest
courtship a man ever undertook. She was more like a piece of
quicksilver than a girl. She was as uncertain as a spring wind, as
flighty as a ball of thistledown--"Doesn't know her own mind for ten
minutes together," he groaned. "Hasn't any mind at all," he'd think an
hour later. While, on the following day, it might be--"That woman is
too deep, she is dodging all round me, she is sticking her finger in my
eye. She treats me as if I wasn't there at one moment, and diddles me
as if I was Tom Fool the next--I'll get out of it."

He had got out of it three or four times--halted her against a wall,
and, with a furious forefinger, wagged all her misdeeds in her face;
then, rating her up, down and round, he had prepared to march away
complacent and refreshed like Justice taking leave of a sinner, only to
find that if the jade wept he could not go away--

"Dash it all," said he, "you can't leave a girl squatting down against
a wall, with her head in her lap and she crying. Hang it," said he,
"you feel as if there was water round your legs and you'll splash if
you move."

So he leavened justice with mercy, and, having dried her tears with his
lips, he found himself in the same position as before, with a mad
suspicion tattering through his brain that maybe he had been "diddled"
again.

But he married her, and to do that was a job also. She shied at
matrimony. She shied at everything that looked plain or straight. She
was like a young dog out for a walk: when she met a side-street she
bolted down it and was instantly surrounded by adventure and misery,
returning, like the recovered pup, thick with the mud of those
excursions. Th