he swirl and smother of the snow. Inside burns the fire,
kindling into glorious pink and white peonies on the nearest wall and
glowing warm and sweet on her face as she reads. The children are in
bed. She is reading aloud to me:

"'I wish the good old times would come again,' she said, 'when we were
not quite so rich. I do not mean that I want to be poor, but there was
a middle state'--so she was pleased to ramble on--'in which, I am sure,
we were a great deal happier.'"

Her eyes left the familiar page, wandering far away beyond the fire.

"Is it so hard to bear up under two thousand five hundred a year?" I
asked.

The gleam of the fire, or perhaps a fancy out of the far-beyond,
lighted her eyes as she answered,

"We began on four hundred and fifty a year; and we were perfectly--"

"Yes, but you forget the parsonage; that was rent free!"

"Four hundred and fifty with rent free--and we had everything we
could--"

"You forget again that we had n't even one of our four boys."

Her gaze rested tenderly upon the little chairs between her and the
fire, just where the boys had left them at the end of their listening
an hour before.

"If you had allowed me," she went on, "I was going to say how glad we
ought to be that we are not quite so rich as--"

"We should like to be?" I questioned.

"'A purchase'"--she was reading again--"'is but a purchase, now that
you have money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph.
Do you not remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you,
till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare--and
all because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher which you dragged home
late at night from Barker's in Covent Garden? Do you remember how we
eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase,
and had not come to a determination till it was near ten o'clock of the
Saturday night, when you set off from Islington, fearing--'

"Is n't this exactly our case?" she asked, interrupting herself for no
other purpose than to prolong the passage she was reading.

"Truly," I replied, trying hard to hide a note of eagerness in my
voice, for I had kept my battery masked these many months, "only Lamb
wanted an old folio, whereas we need a new car. I have driven that old
machine for five years and it was second-hand to begin with."

I watched for the effect of the shot, but evidently I had not got the
range, for she was saying.

"Is there a s