alone?"

"Mr. Brent is here. He brought over some Banbury people to play bridge.
They've gone."

"Oh, Brent will amuse you," he replied. "I didn't know you were going to
be home, and I've promised these men. I'll come back early."

She hung up the receiver thoughtfully, paused a moment, and went back to
the drawing-room. Brent looked up.

"Well," he said, "was I right?"

"You seem always to be right," Honora, sighed.

After dinner they sat in the screened part of the porch which Mrs. Fern
had arranged very cleverly as an outside room. Brent had put a rug over
Honora's knees, for the ocean breath that stirred the leaves was cold.
Across the darkness fragments of dance music drifted fitfully from the
Club, and died away; and at intervals, when the embers of his cigar
flared up, she caught sight of her companion's face.

She found him difficult to understand. There are certain rules of thumb
in every art, no doubt,--even in that most perilous one of lion-taming.
But here was a baffling, individual lion. She liked him best, she told
herself, when he purred platonically, but she could by no means be sure
that his subjection was complete. Sometimes he had scratched her in his
play. And however natural it is to desire a lion for one's friend, to be
eaten is both uncomfortable and inglorious.

"That's, a remarkable husband of yours," he said at length.

"I shouldn't have said that you were a particularly good judge of
husbands," she retorted, after a moment of surprise.

He acknowledged with a laugh the justice of this observation.

"I stand corrected. He is by no means a remarkable husband. Permit me to
say he is a remarkable man."

"What makes you think so?" asked Honora, considerably disturbed.

"Because he induced you to marry him, for one thing," said Brent. "Of
course he got you before you knew what you were worth, but we must give
him credit for discovery and foresight."

"Perhaps," Honora could not resist replying, "perhaps he didn't know what
he was getting."

"That's probably true," Brent assented, "or he'd be sitting here now,
where I am, instead of playing poker. Although there is something in
matrimony that takes the bloom off the peach."

"I think that's a horrid, cynical remark," said Honora.

"Well," he said, "we speak according to our experiences--that is, if
we're not inclined to be hypocritical. Most women are."

Honora was silent. He had thrown away his cigar, and she could no longer
se