on that
was often during these days in her attitude toward her godfather. "I
can't! Please don't tease me to! The curtains to the spare room have to
be put up, and the bed draperies somehow fixed. A stray dog got in there
when he was wet and muddy and went to sleep on my best lace bedspread."

Dr. Melton had not practiced for years among Endbury ladies without
having some knowledge of them and a corresponding readiness of mind in
meeting the difficulties they declared insurmountable. "I'll buy you a
white marseilles bedspread on our way back from the walk," he offered
gravely.

"Oh, I've got plenty of plain white ones," she admitted incautiously,
"but they don't go with the scheme of the room--and the first
reception's only two days off."

Dr. Melton fixed her with an ironical and melancholy smile: "Now,
Lydia, I did think you had it in you to realize that your health and the
strength of your child are worth more than--"

Lydia sprang up and confronted him with an apparent anger of face and
accent that was contradicted by her trembling chin and suffused eyes.
"Oh, go away!" she commanded him, shaking her head and motioning him
off. "Don't talk so to me! I can't help it--what I do! Everything's a
part of the whole system, and I'm in that up to my neck--you know I am.
If that's right, why, everything's all right, just the way everybody
thinks it is. And if it's wrong--" She caught her breath, and turned
back to her desk. "If it's wrong, what good would be done by little
dribbling compromises of an occasional walk." She sat down wearily, and
leaned her head on her hand. "I just wish you wouldn't keep me so
stirred up--when I'm trying so _hard_ to settle down!"

Dr. Melton seemed to divine perfectly the significance of this
incoherent outbreak. He thrust out his lips in his old grimace that
denoted emotion, and observed the speaker in a frowning silence. When
she finished, he nodded: "You are right, Lydia, I do no good." He
twirled his hat about between his fingers, looking absently into the
crown, and added, "But you must forgive me, I love you very dearly."

Lydia ran over to him, conscience-stricken. He took her embrace and
remorseful kiss quietly. "Don't be sorry, Lydia dear. You have just
shown me, as in a flash of lightning, how much more powerful a grasp on
reality you have than I."

Lydia recoiled from him with an outcry of exasperation. "I! Why, I'm
almost an idiot! I haven't a grasp on anything! I can't se