Again her eyes questioned mutely.

He leaned forward and touched the Christmas roses with his lips. Then he
dropped her hands and caught her by the shoulders.

"Oh! foolish, foolish, foolish people!" he said. "We two are man and
wife. My wife! my wife! my wife! We are, aren't we?"

"I suppose we are," she said, and her face leaned a little towards his.

"Well, then!" said he.

X

THE HOUSE OF SILENCE

The thief stood close under the high wall, and looked to right and left.
To the right the road wound white and sinuous, lying like a twisted
ribbon over the broad grey shoulder of the hill; to the left the road
turned sharply down towards the river; beyond the ford the road went
away slowly in a curve, prolonged for miles through the green marshes.

No least black fly of a figure stirred on it. There were no travellers
at such an hour on such a road.

The thief looked across the valley, at the top of the mountain flushed
with sunset, and at the grey-green of the olives about its base. The
terraces of olives were already dusk with twilight, but his keen eyes
could not have missed the smallest variance or shifting of their lights
and shadows. Nothing stirred there. He was alone.

Then, turning, he looked again at the wall behind him. The face of it
was grey and sombre, but all along the top of it, in the crannies of the
coping stones, orange wallflowers and sulphur-coloured snapdragons shone
among the haze of feathery-flowered grasses. He looked again at the
place where some of the stones had fallen from the coping--had fallen
within the wall, for none lay in the road without. The bough of a mighty
tree covered the gap with its green mantle from the eyes of any chance
wayfarer; but the thief was no chance wayfarer, and he had surprised the
only infidelity of the great wall to its trust.

To the chance wayfarer, too, the wall's denial had seemed absolute,
unanswerable. Its solid stone, close knit by mortar hardly less solid,
showed not only a defence, it offered a defiance--a menace. But the
thief had learnt his trade; he saw that the mortar might be loosened a
little here, broken a little there, and now the crumbs of it fell
rustling on to the dry, dusty grass of the roadside. He drew back, took
two quick steps forward, and, with a spring, sudden and agile as a
cat's, grasped the wall where the gap showed, and drew himself up. Then
he rubbed his hands on his knees, because his hands were bloody from the