I'd
talked--"

"Oh, Orville, don't! I can't bear--Have you had your breakfast?"

"Why, no. The train was an hour late. You know that Ashland train."

But she was out of his arms and making for the kitchen. "You go and
clean up. I'll have hot biscuits and everything in fifteen minutes. You
poor boy. No breakfast!"

She made good her promise. It could not have been more than twenty
minutes later when he was buttering his third feathery, golden brown
biscuit. But she had eaten nothing. She watched him, and listened, and
again her eyes were sombre, but for a different reason. He broke open
his egg. His elbow came up just a fraction of an inch. Then he
remembered, and flushed like a schoolboy, and brought it down again,
carefully. And at that she gave a little tremulous cry, and rushed
around the table to him.

"Oh, Orville!" She took the offending elbow in her two arms, and bent
and kissed the rough coat sleeve.

"Why, Terry! Don't, honey. Don't!"

"Oh, Orville, listen--"

"Yes."

"Listen, Orville--"

"I'm listening, Terry."

"I've got something to tell you. There's something you've got to know."

"Yes, I know it, Terry. I knew you'd out with it, pretty soon, if I just
waited."

She lifted an amazed face from his shoulder then, and stared at him.
"But how could you know? You couldn't! How could you?"

He patted her shoulder then, gently. "I can always tell. When you have
something on your mind you always take up a spoon of coffee, and look at
it, and kind of joggle it back and forth in the spoon, and then dribble
it back into the cup again, without once tasting it. It used to get me
nervous when we were first married watching you. But now I know it just
means you're worried about something, and I wait, and pretty soon--"

"Oh, Orville!" she cried, then. "Oh, Orville!"

"Now, Terry. Just spill it, hon. Just spill it to daddy. And you'll feel
better."

VI

THE WOMAN WHO TRIED TO BE GOOD

Before she tried to be a good woman she had been a very bad woman--so
bad that she could trail her wonderful apparel up and down Main Street,
from the Elm Tree Bakery to the railroad tracks, without once having a
man doff his hat to her or a woman bow. You passed her on the street
with a surreptitious glance, though she was well worth looking at--in
her furs and laces and plumes. She had the only full-length sealskin
coat in our town, and Ganz' shoe store sent to Chicago for her shoes.
Hers were the miracul