been satisfied with the standing of an ordinary lawyer; the career he
had set before himself needed a larger background than any one city,
even his country's metropolis, could offer, and in his future the
position and qualities of his wife would count enormously. Money,
breeding and beauty he had always told himself he must marry, but to
win brains and a loving heart into the bargain was more than even he
could have expected, and he admitted the justice of his friends'
half-earnest jealousy.

To-night he raised his glass gallantly and drank to her bright dark
eyes, noting with pleasure that she had remembered to have her new gown
of the filmy black material he fancied so much!

"Why should either of them be 'wild,' dearest?" he asked.

"Papa told me once, when I was a child, that every Appleyard that he
had ever heard of had two children, a son and a daughter," she said
thoughtfully, "and one of them was always staid and steady and--oh,
well, looked up to in the community, you know, and the other always
flighty and ... unusual, to put it mildly. And certainly, as far back
as _I_ can remember, it has been so.

"There was Aunt Adelaide. Grandpapa found her one day acting in a play
in the town hall in the little village where they went for the
summer--right on the stage with all those travelling actors. She
actually wanted to go with them!"

"Absurd!" said her husband, selecting and peeling for her a specially
fine peach.

"But grandpapa himself," she went on thoughtfully, "threatened to go as
a common sailor before the mast, rather than be tied down to
business--papa showed me a letter he wrote once; he said it was
sickening to him to think of putting up the shutters every night and
heaping up money in a strong-box."

"How about your great-grandfather?" he asked idly. "I don't know about
him," she said, "except that I am named for my great-grandmother. They
were the first Appleyards to come to this country, you know."

"I know," he said politely. He himself traced his ancestry to a cousin
of Henry of Navarre, and was furiously proud of it, though wild horses
could not have dragged from him an allusion to it.

They dipped into the heavy crystal finger bowls in silence. Then, as a
sudden curious idea struck him,

"But how do you account, on that theory, for your own generation?" he
asked. "Certainly no one could call Johnny wild?"

"Poor old Johnny!" she said, laughing, "no, indeed! The wildest step