kiss. "You are happy, aren't you
Winifred? More than anything else in the world, I want you to be happy.
Sometimes, of late, I've thought you looked as if you were troubled."

"No; it's only when you are troubled and harassed that I feel worried,
Bartley. I wish you always seemed as you do to-night. But you don't,
always." She looked earnestly and inquiringly into his eyes.

Alexander took her two hands from his shoulders and swung them back and
forth in his own, laughing his big blond laugh.

"I'm growing older, my dear; that's what you feel. Now, may I show you
something? I meant to save them until to-morrow, but I want you to
wear them to-night." He took a little leather box out of his pocket and
opened it. On the white velvet lay two long pendants of curiously worked
gold, set with pearls. Winifred looked from the box to Bartley and
exclaimed:--

"Where did you ever find such gold work, Bartley?"

"It's old Flemish. Isn't it fine?"

"They are the most beautiful things, dear. But, you know, I never wear
earrings."

"Yes, yes, I know. But I want you to wear them. I have always wanted
you to. So few women can. There must be a good ear, to begin with, and
a nose"--he waved his hand--"above reproach. Most women look silly in
them. They go only with faces like yours--very, very proud, and just a
little hard."

Winifred laughed as she went over to the mirror and fitted the delicate
springs to the lobes of her ears. "Oh, Bartley, that old foolishness
about my being hard. It really hurts my feelings. But I must go down
now. People are beginning to come."

Bartley drew her arm about his neck and went to the door with her. "Not
hard to me, Winifred," he whispered. "Never, never hard to me."

Left alone, he paced up and down his study. He was at home again, among
all the dear familiar things that spoke to him of so many happy years.
His house to-night would be full of charming people, who liked and
admired him. Yet all the time, underneath his pleasure and hopefulness
and satisfaction, he was conscious of the vibration of an unnatural
excitement. Amid this light and warmth and friendliness, he sometimes
started and shuddered, as if some one had stepped on his grave.
Something had broken loose in him of which he knew nothing except
that it was sullen and powerful, and that it wrung and tortured him.
Sometimes it came upon him softly, in enervating reveries. Sometimes it
battered him like the cannon rolling in the hol