s and Sundays,
she found her husband where she had left him, still busy with those new
scientific works. She recounted to him some incidents of her call
upon Mrs. Davis, as she took off her hat and put on the big kitchen
apron--how pleased Mrs. Davis seemed to be; how her affection for
her sister-in-law, the grocer's wife, disclosed itself to be not even
skin-deep; how the children leaped upon the candy as if they had never
seen any before; and how, in her belief, Mr. Davis would be heart and
soul on Theron's side at the Conference.

To her surprise, the young minister seemed not at all interested.
He hardly looked at her during her narrative, but reclined in the
easy-chair with his head thrown back, and an abstracted gaze wandering
aimlessly about the ceiling. When she avowed her faith in the
Sunday-school superintendent's loyal partisanship, which she did with
a pardonable pride in having helped to make it secure, her husband even
closed his eyes, and moved his head with a gesture which plainly bespoke
indifference.

"I expected you'd be tickled to death," she remarked, with evident
disappointment.

"I've a bad headache," he explained, after a minute's pause.

"No wonder!" Alice rejoined, sympathetically enough, but with a note of
reproof as well. "What can you expect, staying cooped up in here all day
long, poring over those books? People are all the while remarking that
you study too much. I tell them, of course, that you're a great hand for
reading, and always were; but I think myself it would be better if you
got out more, and took more exercise, and saw people. You know lots
and slathers more than THEY do now, or ever will, if you never opened
another book."

Theron regarded her with an expression which she had never seen on his
face before. "You don't realize what you are saying," he replied slowly.
He sighed as he added, with increased gravity, "I am the most ignorant
man alive!"

Alice began a little laugh of wifely incredulity, and then let it die
away as she recognized that he was really troubled and sad in his mind.
She bent over to kiss him lightly on the brow, and tiptoed her way out
into the kitchen.

"I believe I will let you make my excuses at the prayer-meeting this
evening," he said all at once, as the supper came to an end. He
had eaten next to nothing during the meal, and had sat in a sort of
brown-study from which Alice kindly forbore to arouse him. "I don't
know--I hardly feel equal to