r. Larue, without enthusiasm. "Oh, by the
way, Alexander, I heard that you were inquiring for me at the office
last week. Anything I can do for you?"

"Have you any money lying around just now that you don't know what to
do with?" asked Justin significantly.

Mr. Larue's dark, deep-set eyes took on the guarded change which the
mention of money brings into social relations.

"Perhaps," he admitted.

"May I come around to-morrow at three o'clock and talk to you?"

"Yes, do," said the other, preparing to move on. "Please don't get up,
Mrs. Alexander; you don't look as well as I'd like to see you."

"Oh, I'm all right," said Lois.

"You must try and get strong this summer," said Mr. Larue, his eyes
dwelling on her with an intimate, penetrating thoughtfulness before he
turned away and went, Justin accompanying him down the walk, Zaidee
dancing on behind. Lois looked after them. At the gate, Mr. Larue
turned once more and lifted his hat to her.

A faint, lovely color had come into Lois' cheek, brought there by the
powerful tonic which she always felt in Eugene Larue's presence. She
felt cheered, invigorated, comforted, by a man with whom she had
hardly talked alone for an hour altogether in their whole five years'
acquaintance. He had a way of taking thought for her on the slightest
occasion, as he had to-day: he knew when she entered a room or left
it, and she knew that he knew.

It was one of those peculiar, unspoken sympathetic intimacies which
exist between certain men and women, without the conscious volition of
either. His glance or the tone of his voice was a response to her
mood; he saw instinctively when she was too warm or too cold, or
needed a rest. Her husband, who loved her, had no such intuitions; he
had to be told clumsily, and even then might not understand. Yet she
had not loved him the less because she must beat down such little
barriers herself; perhaps she had loved him the more for it--he was
the man to whom she belonged heart and soul: but the barriers were a
fact. She had an absolute conviction that she could do nothing that
Eugene Larue would misunderstand, any more than she misunderstood her
involuntary attraction for him. Above all things, he reverenced her as
his ideal of what a wife and mother should be. He would have given all
he possessed to have the kind of love which Justin took as a matter of
course.

Eugene Larue had been married himself for ten years, for more than
half of which