ort of way, and I'm just man
enough to lay no obstacle whatever in your track. In the next life you
and Dick will be reunited, and all things will be made straight. I don't
want to fuss with you over it, Hettie. This life is too beautiful, if it
is looked at right, to waste time in jowering. You and me can live in
harmony from now on if you'll just be reasonable and not fly off the
handle when a feller is doing his level best to arrive at some sort of
common meeting-ground. All these years I've been fretting and trying to
run a race with a dead man when I could have been in more active
business. I've give in at last, and I'm going to stay give in. The truth
is, I'm just beginning to live. For the first time in my life I'm in
sympathy with true, natural-born, well-mated lovers. If they are tied
together, all well and good; but if they are parted by some hook or
crook, then they are to be pitied, but still they've got the
satisfaction of knowing--well, of knowing what they know--that's all."

"Well, I know _one_ thing," Mrs. Henley said, and she turned away,
angrily. "I know you are simply daft--you've lost every grain of sense
you ever had."

"I might have known she'd twist the thing all upside-down and never see
it right," Henley mused, as he watched her ascend the steps, cross the
porch, and disappear in the house. "I thought that view would hit her
just right, but, contrary as she always was, she sees fit to disagree. I
reckon if she knew everything there _would_ be a row. Huh, I wouldn't
risk that with her. She can hold her funeral conclaves, and build
monuments to another fellow as high as a church-steeple, and expects me
to swallow the dose, but just let me kind o' look about a little, and
I'm a fit subject for a madhouse."

CHAPTER XXX

The next morning at breakfast Mrs. Henley seemed to have lost all memory
of the angry scene on the grass the evening before. Her countenance was
overcast with an expression that her husband would have designated as
one of pleasure had he been given to the analysis of her facial
phenomena, a pursuit he had long since given up as futile and
unprofitable. Her dress, too, showed unusual care, and a crisp,
fresh-ironed jauntiness that jerked him back to the past with rather
disagreeable suddenness. Amid the white ruffles at her neck she had
pinned a large, full-blown rose, and her manner toward the others was a
fragile sort of graciousness which would have been a delight if