t touched
his heart and he spoke more kindly.

"Come, Toni, don't let's make a scene over this. You're my wife, you
know--I didn't marry you because I wanted a secretary, I married you
because I wanted you for my wife----"

"Even though you didn't love me." Toni spoke quietly, even a little
sadly, and Owen's heart sank as he realized what her words implied.

"I didn't love you?" For the life of him he did not know what to say.

"No. I thought you did--but it doesn't matter," said Toni a little
drearily. "I'm sorry I made a scene just now, Owen. Please forgive me. I
won't do it again."

And without waiting for a reply she opened the door and went out of the
room, leaving Owen staring after her, stirred to the depths of his soul
by something he thought he had read in her usually child-like eyes.

It was no child who had gazed at him as she spoke those last few words.
It was a woman who had looked through Toni's Southern eyes in that
moment of stress; and for the first time since his marriage, Owen
wondered whether his estimate of Toni had been incorrect after all.

He had thought her soulless, a pretty, light-hearted, unselfish little
comrade, swayed by feminine whims and caprices, but incapable of rising
to the stature of the perfect woman; and lo, in one moment of
unconscious revelation she had shown herself to him as a woman indeed,
one who had realized that he had married her for some other cause than
love, yet did not stoop to blame him.

But if Toni were indeed a woman, one capable, moreover, of a totally
unexpected magnanimity, he had indeed been guilty of a serious mistake,
and the very idea that he had misread Toni's character so hopelessly
filled Owen with a humility as disturbing as it was complete.

CHAPTER XXI

The immediate effect of the little scene at the breakfast table was
unfortunately that of an increased intimacy between Toni Rose and
Herrick's wife.

Although Toni's exit from the battlefield had been quiet and even
dignified, she found it hard to forgive Owen's plain-speaking on the
subject of what he supposed to be her silly prejudice against Miss
Loder. He had called her conduct vulgar and ungenerous, had spoken,
moreover, in the tone in which a harsh schoolmaster might censure a
naughty child; and all her love for Owen could not prevent a feeling of
humiliation which galled her sorely.

The sight of Miss Loder, trim, competent, complacent, acted upon Toni's
nerves in much th