retty sure I shouldn't like my wife
to go to the polls," I answered.

Again she laughed. "It's funny, isn't it?--that when you ask a man
anything about women, he always begins to talk about his wife, even when
he hasn't got one?"

"That's because he's always hoping to have one, I suppose."

"Do you want one very badly?" she taunted.

"Dreadfully--the one I want."

"A real dream lady in pink tarlatan?"

"No, a living lady in a riding habit."

If I had thought to embarrass her by this flight of gallantry, my hope
was fruitless, for the arrow, splintered by her smile, fell harmlessly
to the dust of the road.

"An Amazon seems hardly the appropriate mate to Sir Charles Grandison,"
she retorted.

"Just now it was the General that I resembled."

"Oh, you out-generaled the General a mile back. Even he didn't attempt
to break the heart of Aunt Matoaca at their second meeting."

The candid merriment in her face had put me wholly at ease,--I who had
stood tongue-tied and blushing before the simpers of poor Bessy. Dare as
I might, I could bring no shadow of self-consciousness, no armour of
sex, into her sparkling eyes.

"And have I tried to break yours?" I asked bluntly.

"Have you? You know best. I am not familiar with Grandisonian tactics."

"I don't believe there's a man alive who could break your heart," I
said.

With her arm on the neck of the sorrel mare, she gave me back my glance,
straight and full, like a gallant boy.

"Nothing," she remarked blithely, "short of a hammer could do it."

We laughed together, and the laughter brought us into an intimacy which
to me, at least, was dangerously sweet. My head whirled suddenly.

"You asked me last night about the one thing I'd wanted most all my
life," I said.

"The thing that made you learn Johnson's Dictionary by heart?" she
asked.

"Only to the end of the _c_'s. Don't credit me, please, with the whole
alphabet."

"The thing, then," she corrected herself, "that made you learn the _a_,
_b_, _c_'s of Johnson's Dictionary by heart?"

"If you wish it I will tell you what it was."

For the first time her look wavered. "Is it very long? Here is Franklin
Street, and in a little while we shall be at home."

"It is not long--it is very short. It is a single word of three
letters."

"I thought you said it had covered every hour of your life?"

"Every hour of my life has been covered by a word of three letters."

"What an elastic word!"

"It is, for