erstand we don't want 'em to meddle
in our affairs."

"Right," growled Nourse. And a moment later the three men confronted
two astonished wives, and Bill was gravely announcing, "We've done this
thing all by ourselves. The firm is 'Nourse, Lanier and Crothers.' And
from this night on we propose to do business without any interference
from wives. Understand!" He frowned menacingly. "We settled that this
afternoon. And the next thing we decided was that Joe packs up this
wife of his, whether she happens to like it or not, and takes her over
to Paris. See? And if she tries to keep him from work by yanking him
all around to the shops--"

While Nourse growled on in his surly way, Ethel slipped quietly into the
hall--where presently Sally with one arm about her was proffering a
handkerchief and murmuring.

"Use mine, dear."

CHAPTER XXVIII

On the night before they sailed for France, long after she had gone to
bed Ethel came out in her wrapper into the warm dark living-room. There
was something she had forgotten to do, and she wanted to get it off her
mind. She switched on the light by the doorway, and looked about her
smiling, but with a little shiver, too.

The ghost was gone--or nearly so. Already the room had been stripped
bare. Only Ethel's desk was left, and a chair or two and the long,
heavy table with a lamp at either end. Amy's picture was still on the
table, but it lay now on its back and looked up at the ceiling as though
it knew it must soon depart. Tomorrow the movers would finish their
work. Soon somebody else's things would be here, and somebody else's
life would pour in and fill the room and make it new. Somebody else.
What kind of a woman? Another Amy, or Fanny Carr, or Sally Crothers or
Mrs. Grewe? What a funny, complicated town. On her return a year from
now, Ethel had already decided to take a small house near Washington
Square. How long would that experiment last! Doubtless in the years
ahead she would try other homes, one after the other. "Why do we move
so in New York!" She thought of that plan of her husband's for the
future city street, with long rows on either hand of huge apartment
buildings with receding terraces, numberless hanging gardens looking
into the street below. And she wondered whether the city would ever be
anything like that? "In New York all things are possible." . . .

"However." Ethel went to her desk and rummaged for paper, pen and ink.
Then she took out of a cubby-hole