ecially as there isn't any."

"Well," he said, "I feel pretty fair over the whole thing--a lot
better'n I ever expected to, anyhow. I don't know as there's any reason
I shouldn't tell you so."

She was deeply pleased with this acknowledgment, and her voice had
tenderness in it as she responded: "There, honey! Didn't I always say
you'd be glad if you did it?"

Embarrassed, he coughed loudly, then filled his pipe and lit it. "Well,"
he said, slowly, "it's a puzzle. Yes, sir, it's a puzzle."

"What is?"

"Pretty much everything, I guess."

As he spoke, a song came to them from a lighted window over their heads.
Then the window darkened abruptly, but the song continued as Alice went
down through the house to wait on the little veranda. "Mi chiamo Mimi,"
she sang, and in her voice throbbed something almost startling in its
sweetness. Her father and mother listened, not speaking until the song
stopped with the click of the wire screen at the front door as Alice
came out.

"My!" said her father. "How sweet she does sing! I don't know as I ever
heard her voice sound nicer than it did just then."

"There's something that makes it sound that way," his wife told him.

"I suppose so," he said, sighing. "I suppose so. You think----"

"She's just terribly in love with him!"

"I expect that's the way it ought to be," he said, then drew upon
his pipe for reflection, and became murmurous with the symptoms of
melancholy laughter. "It don't make things less of a puzzle, though,
does it?"

"In what way, Virgil?"

"Why, here," he said--"here we go through all this muck and moil to help
fix things nicer for her at home, and what's it all amount to? Seems
like she's just gone ahead the way she'd 'a' gone anyhow; and now, I
suppose, getting ready to up and leave us! Ain't that a puzzle to you?
It is to me."

"Oh, but things haven't gone that far yet."

"Why, you just said----"

She gave a little cry of protest. "Oh, they aren't ENGAGED yet. Of
course they WILL be; he's just as much interested in her as she is in
him, but----"

"Well, what's the trouble then?"

"You ARE a simple old fellow!" his wife exclaimed, and then rose from
her chair. "That reminds me," she said.

"What of?" he asked. "What's my being simple remind you of?"

"Nothing!" she laughed. "It wasn't you that reminded me. It was just
something that's been on my mind. I don't believe he's actually ever
been inside our house!"

"Hasn't he?"

"I actual