hand with
the hammer; but the mark was just too high to be efficiently reached
by both hands simultaneously. Louis might have stood on a chair. This
simple device, however, was too simple for them.

Rachel said--

"Shall I stand on a chair and hold the nail for you?" Louis murmured--

"Brainy little thing! Never at a loss!"

She skipped on to a chair and held the nail. Towering thus above him,
she looked down on her husband and thought: "This man is mine alone,
and he is all mine." And in Rachel's fancy the thought itself seemed
to caress Louis from head to foot.

"Supposing I catch you one?" said Louis, as he prepared to strike.

"I don't care," said Rachel.

And the fact was that really she would have liked him to hit her
finger instead of the nail--not too hard, but still smartly. She would
have taken pleasure in the pain: such was the perversity of the young
wife. But Louis hit the nail infallibly every time.

He took up a picture which had been lying against the wall in a dark
corner, and thrust the twisting wire of it over the nail.

Rachel, when in the deepening darkness she had peered into the frame,
exclaimed, pouting--

"Oh, darling, you aren't going to hang that here, are you? It's so
old-fashioned. You said it was old-fashioned yourself. I did want that
thing that came this morning to be put somewhere here. Why can't
you stick this in the spare room?... Unless, of course, you
_prefer_...." She was being deferential to the art-expert in him,
as well as to the husband.

"Not in the least!" said Louis, acquiescent, and unhooked the picture.

Taste changes. The rejected of Rachel was a water-colour by the late
Athelstan Maldon, adored by Mrs. Maldon. Already it had been degraded
from the parlour to the bedroom, and now it was to be pushed away
like a shame into obscurity. It was a view of the celebrated Vale of
Llangollen, finicking, tight, and hard in manner, but with a certain
sentiment and modest skill. The way in which the initials "A.M."
had been hidden amid the foreground foliage in the left-hand corner
disclosed enough of the painter's quiet and proud temperament to
show that he "took after" his mother. Yet a few more years, and the
careless observer would miss those initials altogether and would
be contemptuously inquiring, "Who did this old daub, I wonder?" And
nobody would know who did the old daub, or that the old daub for
thirty years had been an altar for undying affection, and also a