e fruits
of this placid, abstracted rumination which perhaps they had helped to
induce.

"About your father," he said now, as his wife, who had come out to speak
with him on some other matter, was turning to go away again: "I'm afraid
I annoyed you the other day by what I said."

"I have no recollection of it," she told him, with tranquil politeness,
over her shoulder.

He found himself all at once keenly desirous of a conversation on this
topic. "But I want you to recollect," he said, as he rose to his
feet. There was a suggestion of urgency in his tone which arrested her
attention. She moved slowly toward the chair, and after a little perched
herself upon one of its big arms, and looked up at him where he leant
against the parapet.

"I've thought of it a good deal," he went on, in halting explanation.
His purpose seemed clearer to him than were the right phrases in which
to define it. "I persisted in saying that I'd do something you didn't
want me to do--something that was a good deal more your affair than
mine--and I've blamed myself for it. That isn't at all what I want to
do."

Her face as well as her silence showed her to be at a loss for
an appropriate comment. She was plainly surprised, and seemingly
embarrassed as well. "I'm sure you always wish to be nice," she said at
last. The words and tone were alike gracious, but he detected in them
somewhere a perfunctory note.

"Oh--nice!" he echoed, in a sudden stress of impatience with the word.
"Damn being 'nice'! Anybody can be 'nice.' I'm thinking of something ten
thousand times bigger than being 'nice.'"

"I withdraw the word immediately--unreservedly," she put in, with a
smile in which he read that genial mockery he knew so well.

"You laugh at me--whenever I try to talk seriously," he objected.

"I laugh?" she queried, with an upward glance of demurely simulated
amazement. "Impossible! I assure you I've forgotten how."

"Ah, now we get to it!" he broke out, with energy. "You're really
feeling about it just as I am. You're not satisfied with what we're
doing--with the life we're leading--any more than I am. I see that,
plain enough, now. I didn't dream of it before. Somehow I got the idea
that you were enjoying it immensely--the greenhouses and gardens and all
that sort of thing. And do you know who it was that put me right--that
told me you hated it?"

"Oh, don't let us talk of him!" Edith exclaimed, swiftly.

Thorpe laughed. "You're wrong. It wa