h roses back again."

("The reason why Honor is such a nice girl," a lady once told Captain
Dalton, "is because she has such a charming example of love in her home.
Love is in her bones; her parents are so perfectly united that it is
impossible for Honor to be anything but a good wife. Parents are
immensely responsible for their children's psychology.")

"I have never ceased to thank Providence that I have no children!" said
the wife of a railway official, with a sigh of contentment, "so the
tragedy of separation has never affected me. I can honestly say that I
have never left my husband for more than a day since we married, fifteen
years ago!" and she reared her thin neck out of her evening gown and
looked about her for congratulations.

"Lord, how sick of her he must be!" whispered Tommy under his breath, to
the delight of Jack and Honor. "Life would be stale and unprofitable if
I could not repeat the honeymoon every autumn when my wife returned from
the hills. So thrilling to fall in love with one's own wife every year!"

"Which proves that you will make a very bad husband," said Honor
severely. "Out of sight out of mind."

"He won't talk so glibly of sending his wife to the hills when he has
discovered that she has been carrying on with Snooks of the Convalescent
Depot while he has been stewing in the plains," said Jack with a _blase_
air.

"Since when have you turned cynic, Mr. Darling?" Honor asked,
astonished. "It doesn't become you in the least!"

"Jack had an enlightening holiday in Darjeeling last month when he had
ten days during the _Pujas_," Tommy explained with reprisals in his eye.
"It accounts for his attitude of mind. Having strict principles and a
faint heart, no one had any use for him up there but Mrs. Meredith and
the Y. M. C. A.----"

"Don't listen to him, Miss Bright," Jack interrupted.

"--So in sheer desperation he turned nurse to Squawk and ran errands for
its mother, wondering the while how it was that some men had all the
luck!"

"Draw it mild, I say!"

"And now he sits up half the night composing odes to her eyebrows and
boring me stiff with his sighs."

"Liar!" laughed Jack. "I couldn't write poetry to save my life."

"It doesn't prevent him from trying. Then there's her photograph----"

"It isn't hers, I told you!" Jack protested. "Tommy, you're a villain."

"It's jolly like her, what I saw of it when it fell out from under your
pillow."

By this time Jack was crimson.