d a paper napkin from a glass tumbler, he consoled
himself with the thought that it would not be for long. Also it was some
little compensation to see traces of animation in Augusta's stolid face,
for the atmosphere was vastly more congenial to his wife than that of
the fashionable hotel restaurant where her appetite fled before the
waiter's observant eye and the bewildering nightmare of a menu.

Invariably upon these humiliating occasions when Symes dined cheek by
jowl with _hoi polloi_ who left their spoons in their cups and departed
using a toothpick like a peavy, his thoughts turned to his coming
triumph in Crowheart. And although his gorge rose at the sight of a
large, buck cockroach which scurried across the table and turned to wave
a fraternal leg at him before it disappeared, the knowledge that he
would soon take his rightful position as that city's leading citizen
helped to restore his equanimity.

With an assured income, Company money to spend among the local
merchants, work for many applicants, Symes felt that he could do little
else than step into the niche which clearly belonged to him. The one
smudge upon the picture was Augusta. Her eyes were ever upon him in
adoring, dog-like fidelity and it irritated him. Her appearance had
altered amazingly, she no longer called him "Mister Symes," and by
repeated corrections he had succeeded in inducing her to refrain from
folding her hands upon her abdomen, but the plebeian strain, the
deficiency of gentle birth betrayed itself in a dozen little ways, by
indelicacies none the less irritating because they were trifling.

Symes knew what a gentlewoman should be, for he had mingled with them in
the past and he never had thought of his wife as being anything else
than well born. Augusta's large knuckled hands, conspicuous in white kid
gloves, her long, flat feet, the shiny, bald spots behind her ears, were
sources of real mortification to him, and invariably he found himself
growing red upon the occasions when it was necessary to present her to
his friends.

In the presence of other women she sat bolt upright, a red spot burning
on either cheek-bone, her eyes bright with nervous excitement while she
answered the careless small talk with preternatural seriousness. At such
times Symes himself talked rapidly to hide the gaucheries of her speech,
and they were ordeals which he took care should be as few as possible.

If the yoke were chafing already, he asked himself fre