ew minutes, however, he returned,
and ambling restlessly up and down the room, stopped before his
persistently smiling wife and said somewhat tremulously:

"If Mr. Sylvester takes a notion to come up and see Constantia Maria
to-day, I hope you'll take the opportunity to finish your ironing or
whatever else it is you may have to do. I've noticed he seems a little
shy with the child when you are around."

"Shy with the child when I am around! well I do declare!" exclaimed she,
forgetting her late role in her somewhat natural indignation. "And what
have I ever done to frighten Mr. Sylvester? Nothing but putting on of a
clean apron, when he comes in and a dustin' of the best chair for his
use. It's a trick of yours to get a chance of speakin' to him alone, and
I'll not put up with it. As if it wasn't bad enough to have a kettle
with the nozzle dangling, without living with a man who has a secret he
won't share with his own wife and the mother of his innocent babe."

With a start the worthy man stared at her till he grew red in the face,
probably with the effort of keeping his eyes steady for so long a time.
"Who told you I had a secret?" said he.

"Who told me?" and then she laughed, though in a somewhat hysterical
way, and sat down in the middle of the floor and shook and shook again.
"Hear the man!" she cried. And she told him the story of the placard out
west and then asked him, "if he thought she didn't remember how he used
to act when he was a chasin' up of a thief in the days when he was on
the police force."

"But," he cried, quite as pale now as he had been florid the moment
before, "I'm not in the police force now and you are acting quite silly
and I've no patience with you." And he was making for the door,
presumably to sit upon the stairs, when with a late repentance she
seized him by the arm and said:

"La now," an expression she had caught from Mrs. Kirkshaw, "I didn't
mean nothin' by my talk. Come back, John; Constantia Maria is not well,
and if Mr. Sylvester comes up to see her, I'll just slip out and leave
you alone."

And upon that he told her she was a good wife and that if he had any
secret from her it was only because he was a poor man. "Honesty and
prudence are all the treasures I possess to keep us three from starving.
Shall I part with either of them just to satisfy your curiosity?" and
being a good woman at heart, she said "no," though she secretly
concluded that prudence in his case involved