e suddenly dropped her face on her father's
shoulder.

Hilary groaned in his despair of being able to imagine an injury
sufficiently atrocious to inflict on Maxwell for having brought this
grief upon his girl. At the sound of his groan, as if she perfectly
interpreted his meaning in it, she broke from a sob into a laugh. "Will
you never," she said, dashing away the tears, "learn to let me cry,
simply because I am a goose, papa, and a goose must weep without reason,
because she feels like it? I won't have you thinking that I am not the
happiest person in the world; and I was, even when I was suffering so
because I had to punish Brice for telling me I had done wrong. And if
you think I'm not, I will never tell you anything more, for I see you
can't be trusted. Will you?"

He said no to her rather complicated question, and he was glad to
believe that she was really as happy as she declared, for if he could
not have believed it, he would have had to fume away an intolerable deal
of exasperation. This always made him very hot and uncomfortable, and he
shrank from it, but he would have done it if it had been necessary. As
it was, he got back to his newspaper again with a sufficiently light
heart, when Louise gave him a final kiss, and went indoors and put
herself in authority for the day, and ordered what she liked for
luncheon. The maids were delighted to have her, and she had a welcome
from them all, which was full of worship for her as a bride whose
honeymoon was not yet over.

She went away before her mother got home, and she made her father own,
before she left him, that he had never had such a lovely day since he
could remember. He wanted to drive over to Magnolia with her; but she
accused him of wanting to go so that he could spy round a little, and
satisfy himself of the misery of her married life; and then he would not
insist.

IV.

Louise kept wondering, the whole way back, how Maxwell had managed the
recasting of the love-business, and she wished she had stayed with him,
so that he could have appealed to her at any moment on the points that
must have come up all the time. She ought to have coached him more fully
about it, and told him the woman's side of such a situation, as he never
could have imagined how many advances a woman can make with a man in
such an affair and the man never find it out. She had not made any
advances herself when she wished to get him back, but she had wanted to
make them; a