had yesterday afternoon at tea-time.

Rose, intent on telling him all about it, had postponed the recital
while she made up her own mind as to how she should regard the thing
herself; whether she ought to have been annoyed, or seriously
remonstrant, or whether the smile of pure amusement which had come so
spontaneously to her lips, had expressed, after all, an adequate
emotion.

The look in her husband's face made an end of all doubts, reduced the
episode of yesterday to its proper scale. Married to a man who could
look at her like that, she needn't take any one else's looks or speeches
very seriously. It was at this angle that she told about it.

"Why," she said, "of course he's always talked to me as if I were about
six--sixteen, anyway, no older than that, and the names he makes up to
call me are simply too silly to repeat. But I never paid any attention,
because--well, everybody knows he's that way to everybody. 'Flower face'
was one of his favorites, but there were others that were worse. Well,
yesterday he brought around some old costume plates, but he wouldn't let
me look at them without coming round beside me and--holding my hand, so
that didn't work very well. And then he got quite solemn and said
I'd--given him the only real regret of his life, because he hadn't seen
me until it was too late."

"I didn't know," said Rodney, "that he ever let obstacles like husbands
bother him."

"That's what I thought he meant at first," said Rose, "but it wasn't. He
didn't mean it was too late because of my being married to you. He meant
too late because of him. He couldn't love me, he said, as I deserved,
because he'd been in love so many times before, himself.

"And then, of course, just when I should have been looking awfully sad
and sympathetic, I had to go and grin, and he wanted to know why, and I
said, 'Nothing,' but he insisted, you know, so then I told him.

"Well, it was just what I said to you a while ago--that I didn't know
any men ever talked like that except in books by Hichens or
Chambers--why do you suppose they're both named Robert?--and he went
perfectly purple with rage and said I was a savage. And then he got
madder still and said he'd like to be a savage himself for about five
minutes; and I wanted to tell him to go ahead and try, and see what
happened, but I didn't. I asked him how he wanted his tea, and he didn't
want it at all, and went away."

As she finished, she glanced up into his face fo