"I guess I fixed her that time!" Mr. Waters remarked triumphantly, as he
summoned his second pair of twins from the yard and demanded of them if
the gentleman had given them nickels or dimes.

The gentleman in question became uncomfortably conscious, in the course
of their walk home, of an atmosphere not wholly novel, that lost no
strength in this case from its studied repression. That afternoon, as
they sat in the shade of the big elm, he in his flexible wicker chair,
she in a straight-backed, high-seated legacy from her grandfather, the
whirlwind that Mr. Waters had so lightly sown fell to the reaping of a
victim too amiable and unsuspecting not to escape the sentence of any
but so stern a judge as the handsome and inflexible representative of
the moral order now before him.

Miss Gould was looking her best in a crisp lavender dimity, upon whose
frills Mrs. Waters had bestowed the grateful exercise of her highest
art. Her sleek, dark coils of hair, from which no one stray lock
escaped, framed her fresh cheeks most admirably; her strong white
hands appeared and disappeared with an absolute regularity through
the dark-green wool out of which she was evolving a hideous and useful
shawl. To her lodger, who alternately waved a palm-leaf fan and drank
lemonade, reading at intervals from a two-days-old newspaper, and
carrying on the desultory and amusing soliloquy that they were pleased
to consider conversation, she presented the most attractive of pictures.
"So firm, so positive, so wholesome," he murmured to himself, calling
her attention to the exquisite effect of the slanting rays that struck
the lawn in a dappled pattern of flickering leaf-shadows, and remarking
the violet tinge thrown by the setting sun on the old spire below in the
middle of the village. She did not answer immediately, and when she did
it was in tones that he had learned from various slight experiments to
regard as final.

"Mr. Welles," she said, bending upon him that direct and placid regard
that rendered evasion difficult and paltering impossible, "things have
come to a point;" and she narrated the scene of the morning.

"It is indeed a problem," observed her lodger gravely, "but what is one
to do? It is just such questions as this that illustrate the futility--"

"There is no question about it, Mr. Welles," she interrupted gravely.
"Tom was right and I was wrong. There is no use in my talking to him or
anybody while I--while you--while things a