ouble you," said Mrs. Wayne, but she made it
clear she would like it above everything; so Lanley put on his
spectacles, drew up his chair, and squared his elbows to the job.

"It hasn't been balanced since--dear me! not since October," he said.

"I know; but I draw such small checks."

"But you draw a good many."

She had risen, and was standing before the fire, with her hands behind
her back. Her shawl had slipped off, and she looked, in her short
walking-skirt, rather like a school-girl being reprimanded for a poor
exercise. She felt so when, looking up at her over his spectacles, he
observed severely:

"You really must be more careful about carrying forward. Twice you have
carried forward an amount from two pages back instead of--"

"That's always the way," she interrupted. "Whenever people look at my
check-book they take so long scolding me about the way I do it that
there's no time left for putting it right."

"I won't say another word," returned Lanley; "only it would really
help you--"

"I don't want any one to do it who says my sevens are like fours," she
went on. Lanley compressed his lips slightly, but contented himself by
merely lengthening the tail of a seven. He said nothing more, but every
time he found an error he gave a little shake of his head that went
through her like a knife.

The task was a long one. The light of the winter afternoon faded, and she
lit the lamps before he finished. At first he had tried not to be aware
of revelations that the book made; but as he went on and he found he was
obliged now and then to question her about payments and receipts, he saw
that she was so utterly without any sense of privacy in the matter that
his own decreased.

He had never thought of her as being particularly poor, not at least in
the sense of worrying over every bill, but now when he saw the small
margin between the amounts paid in and the amounts paid out, when he
noticed how large a proportion of what she had she spent in free gifts
and not in living expenses, he found himself facing something he could
not tolerate. He put his pen down carefully in the crease of the book,
and rose to his feet.

"Mrs. Wayne," he said, "I must tell you something."

"You're going to say, after all, that my sevens are like fours."

"I'm going to say something worse--more inexcusable. I'm going to tell
you how much I want you to honor me by becoming my wife."

She pronounced only one syllable. She said, "_Oh_