ht?"

"Yes, he's all right," I said with a great sigh. And I listened for an
answering sigh from the other side of the door.

But instead of that Duncan's voice asked: "Where is he?"

"At Alabama Ranch," I said, without realizing what that acknowledgment
meant. And again a brief period of silence intervened.

"Who found him?" asked my husband, in a hardened voice.

"Peter Ketley," I said, in as collected a voice as I could manage. And
this time the significance of the silence did not escape me.

"Then your cup of happiness ought to be full," I heard the voice on
the other side of the door remark with heavy deliberateness. I stood
there with my face leaning against the cool panel.

"It is," I said with a quiet audacity which surprised me almost as
much as it must have surprised the man on the bed a million miles away
from me.

_Sunday the Eighth_

How different is life from what the fictioneers would paint it! How
hopelessly mixed-up and macaronic, how undignified in what ought to be
its big moments and how pompous in so many of its pettinesses!

I told my husband to-day that Poppsy and I were going back to Casa
Grande. And that, surely, ought to have been the Big Moment in the
career of an unloved invertebrate. But the situation declined to take
off, as the airmen say.

"I guess that means it's about time we got unscrambled," the man I had
once married and lived with quietly remarked.

"Wasn't that your intention?" I just as quietly inquired.

"It's what I've had forced on me," he retorted, with a protective
hardening of the Holbein-Astronomer jaw-line.

"I'm sorry," was all I could find to say.

He turned to the window and stared out at his big white iron fountain
set in his terraced lawn behind his endless cobble-stone walls. I
couldn't tell, of course, what he was thinking about. But I myself was
thinking of the past, the irrecoverable past, the irredeemable past,
the singing years of my womanly youth that seemed to be sealed in a
lowered coffin on which the sheltering earth would soon be heaped, on
which the first clods were already dropping with hollow sounds. We
each seemed afraid to look the other full in the eyes. So we armored
ourselves, as poor mortals must do, in the helmets of pretended
diffidence and the breast-plates of impersonality.

"How are you going back?" my husband finally inquired. Whatever ghosts
it had been necessary to lay, I could see, he had by this time laid.
He no