"I see what you mean," said Mrs. Ewbert, provisionally suspending her sense of the whimsical quality in his suggestion. "But you need never tell me that they wouldn't appreciate you more." "More than old Ransom Hilbrook?" he asked. "Oh, I hope _he_ isn't coming here to-night, again!" she implored, with a nervous leap from the point in question. "If he's coming here every Sunday night"-- As he knew she wished, her husband represented that Hilbrook's having come the last Sunday night was no proof that he was going to make a habit of it. "But he _stayed_ so late!" she insisted from the safety of her real belief that he was not coming. "He came very early, though," said Ewbert, with a gentle sigh, in which her sympathetic penetration detected a retrospective exhaustion. "I shall tell him you're not well," she went on: "I shall tell him you are lying down. You ought to be, now. You're perfectly worn out with that long walk you took." She rose, and beat up the sofa pillows with a menacing eye upon him. "Oh, I'm very comfortable here," he said from the depths of his easy-chair. "Hilbrook won't come to-night. It's past the time." She glanced at the clock with him, and then desisted. "If he does, I'm determined to excuse you somehow. You ought never to have gone near him, Clarence. You've brought it upon yourself." Ewbert could not deny this, though he did not feel himself so much to blame for it as she would have liked to make out in her pity of him. He owned that if he had never gone to see Hilbrook the old man would probably never have come near them, and that if he had not tried so much to interest him when he did come Hilbrook would not have stayed so long; and even in this contrite mind he would not allow that he ought not to have visited him and ought not to have welcomed him. III.