r again, he had a sudden deep craving for the
unreasoning sympathy of love.

"I waited until the last possible moment to tell you, in hopes that I
shouldn't have to, Lois. Anyway, Saunders is going to put up a couple
of houses for next year that you'll like much better, he says."

"Oh, it will be just the same next year; there'll always be
something," said Lois indifferently, getting up and going into the
house.

He was bitterly hurt, and far too proud to show it. He could have
counted on quickest sympathy from her once; he knew in his heart that
he could call it out even now if he chose, but he did not choose. If
his own wife could be like that, she might be.

"Papa dear, I love you so much!"

He looked down to see his little fair-haired girl, white-ruffled and
blue-ribboned, standing beside him a-tiptoe in her little white shoes,
her arms reached up to tighten instantly around his neck as he bent
over.

"Zaidee, my little Zaidee," he said, and, lifting her on his knee,
strained her tightly to him with a rush of such passionate affection
that it almost unmanned him for the moment. She lay against his heart
perfectly still. After a few moments she put her small hand to his
lips, and he kissed it, and she smiled up at him, warm and secure--his
little darling girl, his little princess. Yet, even in that joy of his
child, he felt a new heart-hunger which no child love, beautiful as it
was, could ever satisfy, any more than it could satisfy the
heart-hunger of his wife.

She had begun, since the ball, to go around again as usual, and the
house looked as if it had a mistress in it once more, though the
atmosphere of a home was lacking. She was languid, irritable, and
unsmiling, accepting his occasional caresses as if they made little
difference to her, though sometimes she showed a sort of fierce,
passionate remorse and longing. Either mood was unpleasing to him: it
contained tacit reproach for his separateness. Then, there were still
occasionally evenings when he came home to find her windows darkened
and everything in the household upset and forlorn; when every footfall
must be adjusted to her ear--that ear that had strained and ached for
his coming. Her whole day culminated in that poor, meager half-hour in
which he sat by her, and in which her personality hardly reached him
until he kissed her, on leaving, with a quick, remorseful affection at
being so glad to go.

The typometer disaster had proved as bad as,