how Kerns has kept out of it all these
years?"

The attractive girl beside him turned her face once more so that her
clear, sweet eyes were directly in line with his.

"It _is_ extraordinary," she said seriously. "I think you ought to drop
in at the club some day when you can corner him and bully him."

"I don't want to go to the club," said the infatuated man.

"Why, dear?"

He looked straight at her and she flushed prettily, while a tint of
color touched his own face. Which was very nice of him. So she didn't
say what she was going to say--that it would be perhaps better for them
both if he practiced on her an artistic absence now and then. Younger in
years, she was more mature than he. She knew. But she was too much in
love with him to salt their ambrosia with common sense or suggest
economy in their use of the nectar bottle.

However, the gods attend to that, and she knew they would, and she let
them. So one balmy evening late in May, when the new moon's ghost
floated through the upper haze, and the golden Diana above Manhattan
turned flame color, and the electric lights began to glimmer along Fifth
Avenue, and the first faint scent of the young summer freshened the
foliage in square and park, Kerns, stopping at the club for a moment,
found Gatewood seated at the same window they both were wont to haunt in
earlier and more flippant days.

"Are you dining here?" inquired Kerns, pushing the electric button with
enthusiasm. "Well, that's the first glimmer of common sense you've
betrayed since you've been married!"

"Dining _here_!" repeated Gatewood. "I should hope not! I am just going
home--"

"He's thoroughly cowed," commented Kerns; "every married man you meet at
the club is just going home." But he continued to push the button,
nevertheless.

Gatewood leaned back in his chair and gazed about him, nose in the air.
"What a life!" he observed virtuously. "It's all I can do to stand it
for ten minutes. You're here for the evening, I suppose?" he added
pityingly.

"No," said Kerns; "I'm going uptown to Billy Lee's house to get my suit
case. His family are out of town, and he is at Seabright, so he let me
camp there until the workmen finish papering my rooms upstairs. I'm to
lock up the house and send the key to the Burglar Alarm Company
to-night. Then I go to Boston on the 12.10. Want to come? There'll be a
few doing."

"To Boston! What for?"

"Contracts! We can go out to Cambridge when I've finished