dainty details, gave him a mingled sensation of delight
and embarrassment. It had been many a day, many a year, since he had
consciously observed his wife. She was too useful for him to permit
himself to be influenced by questions of beauty into underrating her
value, and he was a respectable husband, if not a kind one. They had
jogged on so long together that he would have said he had ceased to
be conscious of her appearance. But suddenly he felt that he could not
continue to endure, for another day, the sight of the spreading, flat
house-slippers which, because of her two hundred and forty pounds and
frequently rheumatic feet, she wore about her work. Moreover, it was
forcibly borne in upon him just what a source of irritation they had
been. And they were only as a drop in the bucket! Well, such thoughts
did no one any good. Thank heaven, from now on he would have Rose to
look at.

They settled down beside each other in the front seat and he was aware
that her lovely eyes, so violet-blue and ivory-white, were studying him
admiringly. Here was a man, she was deciding, who for his age was the
physical superior of any she had ever met. He was clearly one of those
whom toil did not bend, and while, she concluded further, he might be
taken for all of his fifty-four years it would be simply because of his
austere manner.

Martin sustained her scrutiny until they were well out of Fallon and
speeding along on a good level road. Then with a teasing "turn
about's fair play," he, too, took a frank look, oddly stirred by the
sophisticated touches which added so subtly to her natural beauty. From
her soft, thick brown hair done up cleverly in the latest mode and her
narrow eyebrows arched, oh, so carefully, and penciled with such skill,
to that same trim provocative pump and disconcerting flash of
silk-clad ankle, Rose had dash. Hers was that gift of style which is as
unmistakable as the gift of song and which, like it, is sometimes to be
found unexpectedly in any village or small town.

Martin drank in every detail wonderingly, with a kind of awe. All his
life, it seemed to him, for the last thirteen years positively, he had
known that somewhere there must be just such a woman whose radiance
would set his heart beating with the rapture of this moment and whose
moods would blend so easily with his own that she would seem like a very
part of himself. And here she was, come true, sitting right beside him
in his own car. For the f