. Our
marriage will straighten out all the--the little difficulties, and you
can go ahead with the singing and not bother about money, or what
people might say, or any of those things."

"I--I've got to think about it, Stanley," she said gently. "I want to
do the decent thing by you and by myself."

"You're afraid I'll interfere in the career--won't want you to go on?
Mildred, I swear I'm--"

"It isn't that," she interrupted, her color high. "The truth is--" she
faltered, came to a full stop--cried, "Oh, I can't talk about it
to-night."

"To-morrow?" he suggested.

"I--don't know," she stammered. "Perhaps to-morrow. But it may be two
or three days."

Stanley looked crestfallen. "That hurts, Mildred," he said. "I was SO
full of it, so anxious to be entirely happy, and I thought you'd fall
right in with it. Something to do with money? You're horribly
sensitive about money, dear. I like that in you, of course. Not many
women would have been as square, would have taken as little--and worked
hard--and thought and cared about nothing but making good-- By Jove,
it's no wonder I'm stark crazy about YOU!"

She was flushed and trembling. "Don't," she pleaded. "You're beating
me down into the dust. I--I'm--" She started up. "I can't talk
to-night. I might say things I'd be-- I can't talk about it. I must--"

She pressed her lips together and fled through the hall to her own
room, to shut and lock herself in. He stared in amazement. When he
heard the distant sound of the turning key he dropped to a chair again
and laughed. Certainly women were queer creatures--always doing what
one didn't expect. Still, in the end--well, a sensible woman knew a
good chance to marry and took it. There was no doubt a good deal of
pretense in Mildred's delicacy as to money matters--but a devilish
creditable sort of pretense. He liked the ladylike, "nice" pretenses,
of women of the right sort--liked them when they fooled him, liked them
when they only half fooled him.

Presently he knocked on the door of the little library, opened it when
permission came in Cyrilla's voice. She was reading the evening
paper--he did not see the glasses she hastily thrust into a drawer. In
that soft light she looked a scant thirty, handsome, but for his taste
too intellectual of type to be attractive--except as a friend.

"Well," said he, as he lit a cigarette and dropped the match into the
big copper ash-bowl, "I'll bet you can't gue