picture he could turn to the
other, and perhaps go back to the first before his eyes were satisfied.

And if during the day some thought brought her suddenly to mind, he
would stop short in whatever he was doing, and remember her little timid
upglancing look as she hazarded, at breakfast, some question about his
work, or remember her enthusiasm, on a country tramp, for the chance
meal at some wayside restaurant, and sheer love of her would overwhelm
him, and he would find his eyes brimming again.

CHAPTER XXVI

So the summer fled, and before she fairly realized it Norma saw the
leaves colouring behind the little house like a wall of fire, and
rustled them with her feet when she tramped with Wolf's big collie into
the woods. The air grew clearer and thinner, sunset came too soon, and a
delicate beading of dew loitered on the shady side of the house until
almost noon.

One October day, when she had been six months a wife, Norma made her
first call upon Annie von Behrens. Alice she had seen several times,
when she had stopped in, late in the summer mornings, to entertain the
invalid with her first adventures in housekeeping, and chat with Miss
Slater. But Chris she had quite deliberately avoided. He had written her
from Canada a brief and charming note, which she had shown Wolf, and he
and Alice had had their share in the general family gift of silver, the
crates and bags and boxes of spoons and bowls and teapots that had
anticipated every possible table need of the Sheridans for generations
to come. But that was all; she had not seen Chris, and did not want to
see him.

"The whole thing is rather like a sickness, in my mind," she told Wolf,
"and I don't want to see him any more than you would a doctor or a nurse
that was associated with illness. I don't know what we--what I was
thinking about!"

"But you think he really--loved you--Nono?"

"Well--or he thought he did!"

"And did you like him terribly?"

"I think I thought I did, too. It was--of course it was something we
couldn't very well discuss----."

"Well, I'm sorry for him." Wolf had dismissed him easily. On her part,
Norma was conscious of no particular emotion when she thought of Chris.
The suddenness and violence with which she had broken that association
and made its resumption for ever impossible, had carried her safely into
a totally different life. Her marriage, her new husband and new home,
her new title indeed, made her seem another wom