"What are you thinking?"

"I was remembering."

"And pray what business have you, sir, to live in anything but the
present?"

"Perhaps I get more from to-day because I don't forget yesterday. When I
first came to St. Etienne, sweetheart, Dick took me to his home. You
know, with your mere mind, but you can not appreciate, how unrelated my
life had been. You can't imagine how hungrily I looked at that restful
room and at Dick's mother. I felt as though I would give anything--my
soul--to have a home. And now, behold, I have one."

"And you had to pledge your soul to me to get it."

"True. I paid dearly," he said. "But I was wondering how it was that you
had managed to put so much atmosphere into so untried a place. It looks
to me as impossible as a miracle. Here are some new walls, and new
furniture and new curtains and new vases and new pictures. Even the
books are mostly new. I always resented new books. They are like green
fruit. A book isn't ripe until it begins to be frayed around the edges.
It would seem to me a hopeless job to make a home out of all this raw
material. Yet this room already reminds me of Mrs. Percival's library,
Madeline, and it isn't only because it is a long room with a big
fireplace."

"I think it is a good beginning," she answered. "Now all we have to do
is to live in it."

"You talk as though 'living' were a very easy matter," he remonstrated.
"I think it must be the hardest thing in the world, judging by the
failures. I know heaps of people who are drifting, or grubbing, or
wallowing, or stumbling, or racing, but only a handful that are living.
The thought of it made me blue all the way home."

"Dick?" Madeline asked with ready intuition.

"Yes, Dick. He voted with the combine and against the reform element in
last night's council meeting; and he did it on some one's compulsion. I
can't tell you how it has stirred and disheartened me."

"Have you seen him?"

"Yes."

"What did he say?"

"That he could not explain."

"Then," said his wife decisively, "it is some of Lena's doings. About
anything else--anything--he would have told you, Ellery."

"Very likely, though it is hard to see how Mrs. Percival could be mixed
up in affairs like this."

Madeline was moving about restlessly.

"Ellery," she said at last, "I feel as though you and I had to be a sort
of pair of god-parents to Dick. He is so dear, so lovable, so fine--and
so unable to go alone. You, particularly, dearest,