o promise me now," he told her.

"Well that I won't!" she answered, roundly.

"You'd see the whole--the whole scheme come to nothing, would you?"--he
scolded at her--"rather than abate a jot of your confounded mulishness."

"Aha!" she commented, with a certain alertness of perception shining
through the stolidity of her mien. "I knew you were humbugging! If
you'd meant what you said, you wouldn't talk about its coming to nothing
because I won't do this or that. I ought to have known better. I'm
always a goose when I believe what you tell me."

A certain abstract justice in her reproach impressed him. "No you're
not, Lou," he replied, coaxingly. "I really mean it all--every word of
it--and more. It only occurred to me that it would all go better, if you
helped. Can't you understand how I should feel that?"

She seemed in a grudging way to accept anew his professions of
sincerity, but she resisted all attempts to extract any promise. "I
don't believe in crossing a bridge till I get to it," she declared,
when, on the point of his departure, he last raised the question, and it
had to be left at that. He took with him some small books she had tied
in a parcel, and told him to read. She had spoken so confidently of
their illuminating value, that he found himself quite committed to their
perusal--and almost to their endorsement. He had thought during the day
of running down to Newmarket, for the Cesarewitch was to be run on the
morrow, and someone had told him that that was worth seeing. By the time
he reached his hotel, however, an entirely new project had possessed his
mind. He packed his bag, and took the next train for home.

CHAPTER XXV

"I DIDN'T ask your father, after all," was one of the things that
Thorpe said to his wife next day. He had the manner of one announcing
a concession, albeit in an affable spirit, and she received the remark
with a scant, silent nod.

Two days later he recurred to the subject. They were again upon the
terrace, where he had been lounging in an easy-chair most of the day,
with the books his sister had bid him read on a table beside him. He had
glanced through some of them in a desultory fashion, cutting pages at
random here and there, but for the most part he had looked straight
before him at the broad landscape, mellowing now into soft browns and
yellows under the mild, vague October sun. He had not thought much of
the books, but he had a certain new sense of enjoyment in th