," she continued, caressingly, "I don't think
it was very nice of me to meddle with your great-grandfather Plunkett's
portrait. It was too much in the line of the people who have their
ancestors painted to order. I think of it quite often at night and
blush, which shows that I have a guilty conscience on the subject,
though I can't help feeling that it has been very much improved
whenever I look at it."

"It was a very trifling amelioration," I answered. "And, if I remember
rightly, it was I who put you up to it."

"Yes, but you were only in jest, and I was base enough to adopt the
idea and act upon it. No, Fred, though I agree that everything has
worked out a great deal more satisfactorily than I deserve, and that we
are infinitely better off than we have ever been before in point of
comfort and general happiness, I look back on the last year and a half
as a sort of nightmare. You were content to live along steadily in the
dear old house and to toil unselfishly for us all, and I was
perpetually prodding you. It has made me feel myself to be a perfect
ogre of a woman. And yet it seemed to me to be necessary, Fred."

"It was not merely necessary, Josephine. It was essential. Thank
goodness we have got through it so lightly! It is not every man who
survives the operation. But, as I have said to you already, I am the
one who should be grateful, and I too was the one at fault. Had you
waited for me to make the suggestion, we should have been still in that
dirty little box of a house, and I should have been wearing the same
black wisp of a necktie such as I have worn for the last fifteen years.
Kiss me, darling."

She did so, and as she leaned her head lovingly against my breast she
looked up and said, tremulously: "It was all on account of the
children, Fred. I wish them to have every chance there is." There
spoke the fond mother-bird. The children! Are these young giants and
giantesses our children? Seemingly but yesterday they were little tots
pottering in the sand with spade and shovel, alternately angelic and
demoniac, supplying annual testimony to the inability of green apples
to oppress a hardy digestion, and free from every inkling of
responsibility save a faint, intermittent respect for parental mandate.
Now they tower before me in the glory of budding manhood and
maidenhood; lovable, yet haughty; with star-like eyes and brows
perplexed by all the problems of the universe; God-like in their
de