ly he read it.

"Please ask Mrs. Aldrich about this bill," it read. "The work done seems
to be the same that was paid for last month."

The rest of the month's bills lay beneath, all neatly scheduled and
totaled; and the total came to more than three thousand dollars. He
damned them cordially and moved them over to one side.

But the mood of quiet contentment he had, for just a moment, captured,
had given place to angry exasperation. He felt like a bull out in a ring
tormented by the glare and the clamor and the flutter of little red
flags.

There was nothing ruinous about his way of living. Including his
inherited income with what he could earn, working the way he had been
working lately, he could meet an expenditure of thirty-six thousand
dollars a year well enough. It meant thinking about his fees of course,
seeing to it that the work he undertook was profitable as well as
interesting. Only, declared the man who was not Rose's husband, it was
senseless--suffocating! Rodney tried, with an athletic sweep of his
will, to crowd that train of thought out of his mind as, with his hand,
he had swept the papers that gave rise to it.

He leaned his elbows on the cleared blotter and propped up his chin on
his fists. The thing exactly in front of his eyes was his desk calendar.
There was something familiar about the date--some subconscious
association that couldn't quite rise to the surface. Was there something
he had to do to-day, that he'd forgotten? No, Miss Beach would have
reminded him of anything except a social engagement. And he distinctly
remembered that Rose had said this morning that the evening was clear.
And yet, surely ... Then, with a grunt of relief and amusement, he got
it. It was his birthday! Another mile-stone.

Where had he been, what had he been doing a year ago to-day? It would be
interesting if he could manage to remember.

A year ago--why, good lord! That was the day it had all begun. He'd sold
the old house that day and then had started to walk over to Frederica's
for dinner, and got caught in the rain and taken a street-car. He had
heard a vibrant young voice say, "Don't dare touch me like that," and,
turning, had seen the blazing glorious creature who held the conductor
pinned by both wrists. That had been Rose--his Rose; whom he was
spending these sixty minutes out of the twenty-four hours trying to
forget about!

And that was only a year ago. It was curiously hard to realize. Their
identi