he went into her room, and he sank into the chair before his desk and
sat there, thinking. When she came back, after a while, he did not look
round at her, and she spoke to the back of his head. "Should you have
any objection to my going home for a few days?"

"No," he returned.

"I know papa would like to have me, and I think you would be less
hampered in what you will have to do now if I'm not here."

"You're very considerate. But if that's what you are going for, you
might as well stay. I'm not going to do anything whatever."

"Now, you mustn't talk foolishly, Brice," she said, with an air of
superior virtue mixed with a hint of martyrdom. "I won't have you doing
anything rash or boyish. You will go on and let them have your play just
the same as if I didn't exist." She somewhat marred the effect of her
self-devotion by adding: "And I shall go on just as if _it_ didn't
exist." He said nothing, and she continued: "You couldn't expect me to
take any interest in it after this, could you? Because, though I am
ready to make any sort of sacrifice for you, I think any one, I don't
care who it was, would say that was a little _too_ much. Don't you think
so yourself?"

"You are always right. I think that."

"Don't be silly. I am trying to do the best I can, and you have no right
to make it hard for me."

Maxwell wheeled round in his chair: "Then I wish you wouldn't make your
best so confoundedly disagreeable."

"Oh!" she twitted. "I see that you have made up your mind to let them
have the play, after all."

"Yes, I have," he answered, savagely.

"Perhaps you meant to do it all along?"

"Perhaps I did."

"Very well, then," said Louise. "Would you mind coming to the train with
me on your way down town to-morrow?"

"Not at all."

XXII.

In the morning neither of them recurred to what Louise had said of her
going home for a few days. She had apparently made no preparation for
the journey; but if she was better than her words in this, he was quite
as bad as his in going down town after breakfast to let Grayson have the
play, no matter whom he should get to do Salome. He did not reiterate
his purpose, but she knew from the sullen leave, or no-leave, which he
took of her, that it was fixed.

When he was gone she had what seemed to her the very worst quarter of an
hour she had ever known; but when he came back in the afternoon, looking
haggard but savage, her ordeal had long been over. She asked him quiet