t to which he was brought, a white cot about
which grave men stood hopelessly, and on the pillow of which spread a
cascade of golden hair. Too imaginative, this Charles-Norton, too
imaginative altogether!

He did not know that after a while Dolly had risen, and a bit wearily,
with heavy sighs, had washed the dishes; that after this she had put the
little flat in order; that during this operation, in spite of her best
efforts, she had felt her woe slowly oozing from her; that the
provisioning tour in the street and stores gay with gossipy, bargaining
young matrons, had almost completed this process; and that a providential
peep in a milliner's window, which had suddenly solved for her the
harassing problem of the spring hat (she had seen one she liked and with
a flash of inspiration had seen how she could make one just like it out
of her old straw and some feathers long at the bottom of her trunk) had
sent her bounding back up her five flights of stairs with a song purring
in her heart.

So that when, returning in the evening, Charles-Norton opened the door
with bated breath, to find Dolly humming happily in the kitchen, he was
struck by something like disappointment. "She's shallow," he thought;
"doesn't feel." He did not mean by this, of course, that he wished she
had in despair done something catastrophic. He meant merely--well, he did
not know what he meant. He was disillusioned, that was all. This was but
a prosy world after all. Few Heroics here!

And immediately a warning knocked at his consciousness. He must be
careful if he were to hold what advantage he had gained in the day. He
turned from the kitchen threshold and silently slunk back into the room
which was both dining and sitting-room, and isolated himself behind the
spread pages of the evening paper. He was curt and cold the entire
evening. And in the morning he again left with calculated
violence--breakfastless and unsheared.

This time, Dolly did not weep. She sat long on the edge of her bed,
thinking silently; then a silver rocket of sound broke the sepulchral
quiet of the flat. Dolly had had a vision of what must inevitably happen;
and Dolly was laughing.

It took just ten days to happen--ten days which were rather disagreeable,
of course, but which Dolly, sure of the trumps in her little hands, bore
with jolly fortitude. All that time, Charles-Norton glowered constantly.
He was monosyllabic and ostentatiously unhappy. This more than was
necessary