de of me and my feet following his, step by step,
as we went like a newfangled sort of quadruped down the narrow steel
rungs.

We were within thirty feet of the ground when I made ever so slight a
misstep and brought Peter up short. The next moment he'd caught me up
bodily in his right arm, and to steady myself I let my arms slip about
his neck. I held on there, tight, even after I knew what I was doing,
and let my cheek rest against the bristly side of his head as we went
slowly down to the bottom of the tower.

It wasn't necessary, my holding my arms about Peter's neck. It wasn't
any more necessary than it was for him to pick me up and carry me the
rest of the way down. It wasn't true-to-the-line fair play, even, when
you come to think of it in cold blood, and it wasn't by any manner of
means just what sedately married ladies should do.

But, if the terrible truth must be told, _it was nice_. I think both
our hearts were a little hungry for the love which didn't happen to be
coming our way, which the law of man and his Maker alike prohibited.
So we saved our dignity and our self-respect, oddly enough, by
resorting to the shallowest of subterfuges. And I don't care much if
it wasn't true-to-the-line ethics. I liked the feel of Peter's arm
around me, holding me that way, and I hope he liked that long and
semi-respectable hug I gave him, and that now and then, later on, in
the emptier days of his life, he'll remember it pleasantly, and
without a bit of bitterness in his heart.

For Alabama Ranch, of course, is going to lose Peter as soon as he can
get away.

_Tuesday the Twenty-fourth_

Peter is no longer with us. He went yesterday, much to the open grief
of an adoring and heart-broken Struthers. I stood in the doorway as he
drove off, pretending to mop my eyes with my hankie and then making a
show of wringing the brine out of it. He laughed at this bit of
play-acting, but it was rather a melancholy laugh. Struthers, however,
was quite snappy for the rest of the morning, having apparently
construed my innocent pantomime as a burlesque of her tendency to
sniffle a little.

I never quite knew how much we'd miss Peter until he was gone, and
gone for good. Even Dinkie was strangely moody and downcast, and
showed his depression by a waywardness of spirit which reached its
crowning misdemeanor by poking a bean into his ear.

This seemed a trivial enough incident, at first. But the heat an