. The nightingales had paused and the
trickle of the fountain behind the house grew suddenly insistent.

When Susy spoke it was in a voice languid with visions. "I have been
thinking," she said, "that we ought to be able to make it last at least
a year longer."

Her husband received the remark without any sign of surprise or
disapprobation; his answer showed that he not only understood her, but
had been inwardly following the same train of thought.

"You mean," he enquired after a pause, "without counting your
grandmother's pearls?"

"Yes--without the pearls."

He pondered a while, and then rejoined in a tender whisper: "Tell me
again just how."

"Let's sit down, then. No, I like the cushions best." He stretched
himself in a long willow chair, and she curled up on a heap of
boat-cushions and leaned her head against his knee. Just above her,
when she lifted her lids, she saw bits of moon-flooded sky incrusted
like silver in a sharp black patterning of plane-boughs. All about them
breathed of peace and beauty and stability, and her happiness was so
acute that it was almost a relief to remember the stormy background of
bills and borrowing against which its frail structure had been reared.
"People with a balance can't be as happy as all this," Susy mused,
letting the moonlight filter through her lazy lashes.

People with a balance had always been Susy Branch's bugbear; they were
still, and more dangerously, to be Susy Lansing's. She detested them,
detested them doubly, as the natural enemies of mankind and as the
people one always had to put one's self out for. The greater part of her
life having been passed among them, she knew nearly all that there was
to know about them, and judged them with the contemptuous lucidity
of nearly twenty years of dependence. But at the present moment her
animosity was diminished not only by the softening effect of love but
by the fact that she had got out of those very people more--yes, ever so
much more--than she and Nick, in their hours of most reckless planning,
had ever dared to hope for.

"After all, we owe them this!" she mused.

Her husband, lost in the drowsy beatitude of the hour, had not repeated
his question; but she was still on the trail of the thought he had
started. A year--yes, she was sure now that with a little management
they could have a whole year of it! "It" was their marriage, their being
together, and away from bores and bothers, in a comradeship of which