The tears came into her
eyes, and she ran round the table to kiss him several times on the top
of his head.

He kept on eating as well as he could, and when she got back to her
place, "Of course, it would have been a good thing for me to go to the
Players'," he teased, "for it would have pleased Grayson, and I should
probably have met some other actors and managers there, and made
interest with them provisionally for my play, if he shouldn't happen to
want it."

"Oh, I know it," she moaned. "You have ruined yourself for me. I'm not
worth it. No, I'm not! Now, I want you to promise, dearest, that you'll
never mind me again, but lunch or dine, or breakfast, or sup whenever
anybody asks you?"

"Well, I can't promise all that, quite."

"I mean, when the play is at stake."

"Oh, in that case, yes."

"What in the world did you say to Mr. Grayson?"

"Very much what I have said to you: that I hated to leave you to lunch
alone here."

"Oh, didn't he think it very silly?" she entreated, fondly. "Don't you
think he'll laugh at you for it!"

"Very likely. But he won't like me the less for it. Men are glad of
marital devotion in other men; they feel that it acts as a sort of
dispensation for them."

"You oughtn't to waste those things on me," she said, humbly. "You ought
to keep them for your plays."

"Oh, they're not wasted, exactly. I can use them over again. I can say
much better things than that with a pen in my hand."

She hardly heard him. She felt a keen remorse for something she had
meant to do and to say when he came home. Now she put it far from her;
she thought she ought not to keep even an extinct suspicion in her heart
against him, and she asked, "Brice, did you know that woman was living
in this house?"

"What woman?"

Louise was ashamed to say anything about the smouldering eyes. "That
woman on the bathing-beach at Magnolia--the one I met the other day."

He said, dryly: "She seems to be pursuing us. How did you find it out?"

She told him, and she added, "I think she _must_ be an actress of some
sort."

"Very likely, but I hope she won't feel obliged to call because we're
connected with the profession."

Some time afterwards Louise was stitching at a centre-piece she was
embroidering for the dining-table, and Maxwell was writing a letter for
the _Abstract_, which he was going to send to the editor with a note
telling him that if it were the sort of thing he wanted he would do the
letters for