d I suppose you think
Mrs. Juliet Marcy Robeson is now smiling happily to herself over this
little surprise. I'll lay you anything you please that if I can make her
own up she'll admit that she said '_Merciful heavens!_' into the telephone
when she got your message."

Anthony shook his head. "Evidently you don't know what guests in the
remote suburbs on a stormy February night mean to a poor girl whose
nearest neighbour is five hundred feet away. Your ideas of married life
need a little freshening, too. They're pretty antique."

It was a half-mile from the station to the house--the "box of a
house"--which had been Anthony's home for five months, and toward which he
now led his friends with the air of a man about to show his most treasured
possessions. He strode through the deepening snow as if he enjoyed the
strenuous tramp, setting a pace which Wayne Carey, with his office life,
if not the doctor, more vigorously built and bred, found difficult to
maintain.

"Here we are," called the leader, pointing toward windows glowing with a
ruddy light. The doctor looked up with interest. Carey was a frequent
visitor, but the busy surgeon, old school-and-college chum of Anthony's
though he was, was about to have his first introduction to a place of
which he had heard much, but of whose nearness to Paradise he doubted with
the strong skepticism of a man who has seen many a fair beginning end in
all unhappiness and desolation.

As they stamped upon the little porch the door flew open, the brilliancy
and comfort of a fire-and-lamplit room leaped out at them, a delicious
faint odour of cookery assailed their hungry nostrils, and the welcome
which makes all worth having met them on the threshold.

"Wayne," said the rich young voice of the mistress of the house, "I'm so
glad. Roger Barnes, this is just downright good of you; it's so long
you've promised us this. Tony----"

What she said to Tony must have been whispered in his ear if voiced at
all, for the two guests, looking on with laughing, envious eyes, saw their
hostess swept unceremoniously into a bearlike embrace, swung into the air
as one thrusts up a child, poised there an instant, laughing and
protesting, then slowly lowered to be kissed, and set down once more
lightly upon the floor.

"It's all right. I didn't tumble your hair a bit," said Anthony coolly.
"Excuse me, gentlemen, but Wayne understands--and Roger will some day, I
hope--that a man who has been thinking ab