udly as she stood close to his side, smoothing the tawny hair. Then
she laid one finger along his lips and made the least little kissing
noise with her own lips--a trick of affection learned in the early days
of their love. After a little she stole from his side, leaving him with
head bent in prayerful study--to be herself alone with her new
assurance.

It was moments like this that she had come to long for and to feed her
love upon. Nor need it be concealed that there had not been one such for
many months. The situation had been graver than she was willing to
acknowledge to herself. Not only had she not ceased to wonder since the
first days of her marriage, but she had begun to smile in her wonder,
fancying from time to time that certain plain answers came to it--and
not at all realising that a certain kind of smile is love's unforgivable
blasphemy; conscious only that the smile left a strange hurt in her
heart.

For a little hour she stayed alone with her joy, fondly turning the
light of her newly fed faith upon an idol whose clearness of line and
purity of tint had become blurred in a dusk of wondering--an idol that
had begun, she now realised with a shudder, to bulk almost grotesquely
through that deepening gloom of doubt.

Now all was well again. In this new light the dear idol might even at
times show a dual personality--one kneeling beside her very earnestly to
worship the other with her. Why not, since the other showed itself truly
worthy of adoration? With faith made new in her husband--and, therefore,
in God--she went to Aunt Bell.

She found that lady in touch with the cosmic forces, over her book, "The
Beautiful Within," her particular chapter being headed, "Psychology of
Rest: Rhythms and Sub-rhythms of Activity and Repose; their Synchronism
with Subliminal Spontaneity." Over this frank revelation of hidden
truths Aunt Bell's handsome head was, for the moment, nodding in
sub-rhythms of psychic placidity--a state from which Nancy's animated
entrance sufficed to arouse her. As the proud wife spoke, she divested
herself of the psychic restraint with something very like a carnal yawn
behind her book.

"Oh, Aunt Bell! Isn't Allan _fine_! Of course, in a way, it's too
bad--doubtless he'll spoil his chances for the thing I know he's set his
heart upon--and he knows it, too--but he's going calmly ahead as if the
day for martyrs to the truth hadn't long since gone by. Oh, dear,
martyrs are _so_ dowdy and out-o