w so?" asked the boy, alert for a pleasantry from his elder.

"Why, Phelps carries this fellow 'round with him everywhere he goes, has
had him for years, and twice a week all he has to do is to say: 'Say,
Fred; write my wife, will you?'"

His listener broke out into a peal of boyish laughter. "Pretty good!" he
applauded the joke.

"It's a fact," Paul went on. "Fred writes it and signs it and sends it
off, and Phelps never has to trouble his head about it."

Lydia stepped back into the darkness of the hall.

When she came out later, a misty figure in white, Paul rose, saying,
"Well, Walter, I'll leave you to Mrs. Hollister now. I've got some work
to do before I get to bed."

Lydia sat silent, looking at the boy's face, clear and untarnished in
the moonlight. He was looking dreamily away at the lawn, dappled with
the shadow of the slender young trees. They seemed creatures scarcely
more sylvan than he, sprawled, like a loitering faun with his hands
clasped behind his head. His mouth had the pure, full outlines of a
child's.

"What are you thinking about, Walter?" Lydia asked him suddenly.

He started, and brought his limpid gaze to hers. "About how to
cross-index our follow-up letter catalogue better," he answered
promptly.

"Really? Really?" She leaned toward him, urging him to frankness.

He was surprised at her tone. "Why, sure!" he told her. "Why not? What
else?"

Lydia said no more.

She had never felt more helplessly her remoteness from her husband's
world than during that spring. It was a sentiment that Paul, apparently,
did not reciprocate. In spite of his frequent absences from home and his
detached manner about most domestic questions, he had as definite ideas
about his wife's resumption of her social duties as had everyone else.
"It made him uneasy," as he put it, "to be losing so many points in the
game."

"Look here, my dear," he said one evening in spring when the question
came up; "summer's almost here, and this winter's been as good as
dropped right out. Can't you just pick up a few threads and make a
beginning? It'll make it easier in the fall." He added, uneasily, "We
don't want old Lowder and Madeleine to get ahead of us entirely, you
know. You can leave the kid with 'Stashie, can't you, once in a while?
She ought to be able to do _that_ much, I should think." He spoke as
though he had assigned to her the simplest possible of all domestic
undertakings. As Lydia made no response, he said