ngs, she concluded, hastily, that the
printers were at fault, and cheerfully amended the latter initials to
the one magic R. In the same way she confused Keats and Yeats; and
finished by ascribing to Christina Rossetti one of Dante Gabriel's most
impassioned utterances; thus destroying whatever value the article might
have had, as a critical appreciation of the various writers' work.

Having completed her task Toni raised her eyes to look at her husband,
and found him lying back in his chair watching her with a very kindly
glance.

"Finished, little girl? That's good. I'll just initial it and send it
back." He took the sheets she handed him and raised his eyebrows at the
numerous corrections. "I say, they must be getting careless at the
office to let all these slips go through!" He ran his eye over the page,
more from force of habit than because he expected to find any more
corrections necessary; and suddenly Toni, watching, saw him frown.

"I say, Toni, you've made a mistake." He tried not to speak sharply, for
after all proof-reading is an art. "This line--'There may be Heaven,
there must be Hell'--that's Robert Browning all right; but the next
quotation is from the Sonnets to the Portuguese."

"Is it?" Toni did not understand.

"Well, Mrs. Browning wrote those, you know." He was busy repairing
Toni's mistake. "And the next is hers, too. And----" he was skimming
down the page "--why, you little goose, it was Dante Rossetti who wrote
'The Blessed Damosel.'"

"Was it? I thought her name was Christina." Toni's voice faltered; for
though she did not yet realize the enormity of her offence, she knew
that Owen was annoyed by her stupidity.

"_Her_ name? Why, of course _her_ name was Christina; but this happens
to be his poem, you see."

"His? Whose?" Toni was flustered, or she would never have betrayed
herself so utterly.

"Whose?" Owen, his nerves strained almost to breaking point by his
bodily pain, spoke irritably, and Toni shrank miserably into her chair.
"Why, Toni, have you never heard of the poet Rossetti? Good Heavens,
child, don't you ever open a book?"

She said nothing, though the tears welled slowly into her eyes; and Owen
went on reading, finding still further evidences of his wife's lack of
acquaintance with the giants of literature as he read.

In an ordinary way he would have let her down gently. After all it is no
crime to confuse two poets of the same name; and to "correct" a
quotation by tra