ted.

"Lord bless me!" he gasped.

"And they'd probably be able to find something of us," she added.

"Not a button, Peggy!"

"Then I'm going to move, if you please!" And suiting her action to the word
Peggy led the way to the buckboard. There she paused and took one of her
husband's big hands fondly in both her own. "It's perfectly wonderful,
Paul--and I'm proud of you!" she said. "But, honestly, dear, I can enjoy it
so much better at four o'clock this afternoon."

Smiling, Blackton lifted her into the buckboard.

"That's why I wish Paul had been a preacher or something like that," she
confided to Joanne as they drove homeward. "I'm growing old just thinking
of him working over that horrid dynamite and powder all the time. Every
little while some one is blown into nothing."

"I believe," said Joanne, "that I'd like to do something like that if I
were a man. I'd want to be a man, not that preachers aren't men, Peggy,
dear--but I'd want to do things, like blowing up mountains for instance, or
finding buried cities, or"--she whispered, very, very softly under her
breath--"writing books, John Aldous!"

Only Aldous heard those last words, and Joanne gave a sharp little cry; and
when Peggy asked her what the matter was Joanne did not tell her that John
Aldous had almost broken her hand on the opposite side--for Joanne was
riding between the two.

"It's lame for life," she said to him half an hour later, when he was
bidding her good-bye, preparatory to accompanying Blackton down to the
working steel. "And I deserve it for trying to be kind to you. I think some
writers of books are--are perfectly intolerable!"

"Won't you take a little walk with me right after dinner?" he was asking
for the twentieth time.

"I doubt it very, very much."

"Please, Ladygray!"

"I may possibly think about it."

With that she left him, and she did not look back as she and Peggy Blackton
went into the house. But as they drove away they saw two faces at the
window that overlooked the townward road, and two hands were waving
good-bye. Both could not be Peggy Blackton's hands.

"Joanne and I are going for a walk this afternoon, Blackton," said Aldous,
"and I just want to tell you not to worry if we're not back by four
o'clock. Don't wait for us. We may be watching the blow-up from the top of
some mountain."

Blackton chuckled.

"Don't blame you," he said. "From an observer's point of view, John, it
looks to me as though you were