ked puzzled for a moment, then laughed lightly. "Oh--yes," he
answered. Advancing, he caught her suddenly, almost vehemently, in his
arms, aud covered the face that was perforce upturned with kisses. When
she was released from this overwhelming embrace, and stood panting
and flushed, regarding him with narrowed, intent eyes, in which
mystification was mellowed by the gleam of not-displeased curiosity, he
preferred a request which completed her bewilderment.

"Mrs. Thorpe," he began, with significant deliberation, but smiling with
his eyes to show the tenderness underlying his words--"would you mind if
we didn't dress for dinner this evening, and if we dined in the little
breakfast-room--or here, for that matter--instead of the big place?"

"Why, not at all, if you wish it," she answered readily enough, but
viewing him still with a puzzled glance.

"I'm full of new ideas," he explained, impulsively impatient of the
necessity to arrange a sequence among his thoughts. "I see great things
ahead. It's all come to me in a minute, but I couldn't see it clearer if
I'd thought it out for a year. Perhaps I was thinking of it all the time
and didn't know it. But anyhow, I see my way straight ahead. You don't
know what it means to me to have something to do. It makes another man
of me, just to think about it. Another man?--yes, twenty men! It's a
thing that can be done, and by God! I'm going to do it!"

She beheld in his face, as she scrutinized it, a stormy glow of the
man's native, coarse, imperious virility, reasserting itself through
the mask of torpor which this vacuous year had superimposed. The large
features were somehow grown larger still; they dominated the countenance
as rough bold headlands dominate a shore. It was the visage of a
conqueror--of a man gathering within himself, to expend upon his
fellows, the appetites, energies, insensibilities, audacities of a beast
of prey. Her glance fluttered a little, and almost quailed, before the
frank barbarism of power in the look he bent upon her. Then it came to
her that something more was to be read in this look; there was in it a
reservation of magnanimity, of protection, of entreating invitation, for
her special self. He might tear down with his claws, and pull to pieces
and devour others; but his mate he would shelter and defend and love
with all his strength. An involuntary trembling thrill ran through
her--and then she smiled up at him.

"What is it you're going to d