I have. I really couldn't put on the green again." She
was silent for some minutes, when another of those queer little cries
escaped her such as had broken from her lips when she stood at the door
with Lois: "But, oh, Archie, I want to do what's right!--what's right,
Archie!"

He looked at her from under his brows as his head again drooped moodily.
"What's--_what_?"

"What's right, Archie. Latterly--Oh, I don't know!--but latterly--" She
passed her hand across her brow.... "Sometimes I feel--I get to be
afraid, Archie--as if we weren't--as if we hadn't--as if something were
going to happen--to overtake us--"

Crossing the room, he bent back her pretty head and kissed her.
"Nonsense," he smiled, unsteadily. "Nerves, dear. Don't wonder at
it--with all we've been through--one way and another. But that's what
we'll do. Close the house up and go abroad for three months.
Inconvenient just now with the upset in the business--but we'll do it.
Get out of the way. See something new. There, now, old girl," he coaxed,
patting her on the shoulder, "brace up and shake it off. Nothing but
nerves." He added, as he moved back toward his stand by the fireplace,
"Get 'em myself."

"Do you, Archie? Like that? Like--like what I said?"

He had resumed his former attitude, his feet wide apart, his hands
behind his back, his head hanging, when he muttered, "Like the devil."

She was not sure how much mental discomfort was indicated by the phrase,
so she sat looking at him distressfully. Being unused to grappling with
grave questions of right and wrong, she found the process difficult. It
was like wandering through morasses in which she could neither sink nor
swim, till she found herself emerging on solid, familiar ground again
with the reconciling observation, "Well, I do need a few things."

CHAPTER XXVII

It was not till Rosie was well enough to go listlessly back to work, and
the Mastermans had sailed, that Lois found her own emotions ripe for
speech. During the intervening fortnight she and Thor had lived their
ordinary life together, but on a basis which each knew to be temporary.
While he kept his office hours in the mornings and visited his patients
in the afternoons, and she busied herself with household tasks or
superintended the gardener in replanting the faded tulip-beds with phlox
and sweet-peas and dahlias; while she sewed or did embroidery in the
evenings and listened to him reading aloud, or--since the nights w