won't be a minute."

He picked her up in his arms, and carried her into the house. A few
moments later he returned, smiling, as if she had said something that
had touched his humor.

"Let's sit on the bench," he said. "It's the one cool place in Aiken,
this morning."

Mechanically I sat down beside him and accepted a cigarette from his
case.

"I always dread the first hot spell for the babies," he said. "I'm
glad we're going up early this year."

"You'll be in New York a while?"

"At the New Turner. And then Stamford. Poor Lucy dreads Stamford, but
I've got to be near the works. What are you planning to do this
summer?"

"It depends a great deal on you, John."

Now he turned to me with a very grave expression on his face. "On me?"

"I love Lucy, John, and she feels the same way about me."

His expression of courteous inquiring gravity did not change. "So
_that's_ what was at the bottom of everything. I told her she was
seeing too much of you, but she wouldn't listen. Of course, my
contention was just on general principles. I thought you were both to
be trusted."

"We only found it out just before you went to Palm Beach."

"You ought to have seen it coming. A man of your experience and record
isn't like a college freshman in such matters."

"If I had seen it coming, John, believe me I'd have run from it. But
all at once it had come, and it's a question now, not of what might
have been, but of Lucy's happiness."

"Yes," he said, "we mustn't think of ourselves now, or of the children.
We must think of what is best for Lucy. And what is best for Lucy
can't be thought out offhand. There's the complication of winding up
here, moving, and so forth. What is your idea? Yours and Lucy's?"

"We hope and trust that you won't want to stand in our way."

"Divorce? Well, of course, it might come to that. It's not, however,
an idea which I am prepared offhand to receive with enthusiasm. Any
more than I propose to act upon the very first impulse which I had when
you told me."

"What was that?"

"I thought how delicious it would be to get my automatic and fill you
full of lead. But you and Lucy, I take it, have so far resisted your
temptations, and I must battle with mine."

"I ought to have said _that_; our temptations have been resisted, John."

He shrugged that vital fact aside with, "Oh, I should have known if
there had been anything to know."

"I needn't say, need I, that I feel like