! I feel like a bird that has
been plucked for years."

Hamilton looked at her in amazement, and despair. More than once he had
caught a glimpse of the frivolous side of her nature, but that it could
spread and control her he never had imagined. Her intelligence, her
passions, her inherited and accumulated wisdom, were crowded into some
submerged cell. There was nothing in her at the present moment for him,
and he turned on his heel without a word and left the house. She rapped
sharply on the window as he passed, but he did not look up. He was
filled with that unreasoning anger peculiar to man when woman for once
has failed to respond. He consigned her and her clothes to the devil,
and looked at his watch. It was ten minutes to one. His dinner hour was
two o'clock. He would go home to his wife, where he should have gone in
the first place. She never had failed him, or if she had he could not
recall the occasion. Her little dark face rose before him, innocent and
adorable. He could not tell her of the cause of his annoyance,--it
suddenly occurred to him that the less of that matter confided to Mrs.
Croix the better,--but then he never worried her with his troubles. He
would merely go and bask in her presence for an hour, confess to a
headache, and receive her sweet ministrations.

As he entered his own house, and, relieved of his coat and hat by the
waiting black, ran up the stair, he thought he heard a soft babble of
voices. Knowing that his wife would, if he desired it, dismiss at once
any company she might have, he knocked confidently at her door and
entered. For a moment he felt inclined to rub his eyes, and wondered if
he were the victim of delirium. The bed was covered with bandboxes, the
sofa with new frocks. Betsey was sitting before the mirror, trying on a
cap, and her sisters, Peggy and Cornelia, were clapping their hands.
Angelica was perched on the back of a chair, her eyes twice their
natural size, Hamilton attempted instant retreat, but Betsey saw his
reflection in the mirror.

"You?" she cried. "What a surprise and pleasure. Come here, sir, at
once."

Meanwhile his two sisters-in-law, whose expected visit he had quite
forgotten, ran forward and kissed him effusively. With the desire in his
heart to rend the Universe in twain he went forward and smiled down into
his wife's eager face.

"Angelica has sent me so many things!" she exclaimed. Her face was
flushed, her eyes sparkling. She looked sixteen. "