ur fractious wife?"

"I'll call Miss Faithful on the phone and say I'm going to play
hooky," he consented. "By the way, you must come down to the office
and say hello to her when you get the time."

Beatrice kissed him. "Must I? I hate offices. Besides, Gaylord has
married your prettiest clerk, and there will be no one to play with me
except my husband."

"Funny thing--that marriage," Steve commented. "If it was any one but
Gay I'd send condolences for loading the office nuisance onto him."

"Wasn't she any use at all?" she asked, curiously.

"None--always having a headache and being excused for the day. That
was the only thing I ever questioned in Mary Faithful--why she engaged
Trudy and took her into her own home as a boarder."

"Oh, so Mary isn't perfection? Don't be too hard on the other girl.
I'd be quite as useless if I ever had to work. I'd do just the
same--have as many headaches as the firm would stand for, and marry
the first man who asked me."

"But think of marrying Gay!"

"Poor old Gay--his father was a dear, and he is terribly well behaved.
Besides, see how obliging he is. Your Miss Faithful refused to help me
out, and Gay ran his legs off to get everything I wanted. I'll never
be rude to Gay as long as he amuses me."

"That's the thing that leads them all, isn't it, princess?"

CHAPTER VI

After the first round of excessively formal entertainments for Mr. and
Mrs. O'Valley, Steve found a mental hunger suddenly asserting itself.
It was as if a farm hand were asked to subsist upon a diet of weak tea
and wafers.

In the first place, no masculine mind can quite admit the superiority
of a feminine mind when it concerns handling said masculine mind's
business affairs. Though Steve insisted that Mary had done quite as
well as he would have done, he told himself secretly that he must get
down to hard work and go over the letters and memoranda which had
developed during his absence.

With quiet amusement Mary had agreed to the investigation, watching
him prowl among the files with the same tolerant attitude she would
have entertained toward Luke had he insisted that he could run the
household more efficiently than a mere sister.

"Poor tired boy," she used to think when Steve would come into the
office with a fagged look on his handsome face and new lines steadily
growing across his forehead. "You don't realize yet--you haven't begun
to realize."

And Steve, trying to catch up with work