"And that was what the trouble was about," she said when they had read the last word in the last line. She raised her eyes to his with laughter in their depths. "It was a very dreadful battle and Phoebe won. The major found this for him to read to her and she said she did not intend to go into the real estate business for her husband or to rise while it was yet night to give him his breakfast. Aren't they funny, _funny_?" and she fairly rippled with delight at her recollection of the vanquishing of the intrepid David. "The standards for a wife were a bit strenuous in those days," he answered, smiling down on her. "I'm afraid Dave will have trouble finding one on those terms. And yet--" he paused and there was a touch of mockery in his tone. "I think that a woman could be very, very happy fulfilling every one of those conditions if she were woman enough," answered Caroline Darrah Brown, looking straight into his eyes with her beautiful, disconcerting, dangerous young seriousness. Andrew picked up his manuscript with the mental attitude of catching at a straw. "Oh," she said quickly, "you were going to read to the major, weren't you?" And the entreaty in her eyes was as young as her seriousness; as young as that of a very little girl begging for a wonder tale. The heart of a man may be of stone but even flint flies a spark. Andrew Sevier flushed under his pallor and ruffled his pages back to a serenade he had written, with which the star for whom the play was being made expected to exploit a deep-timbred voice in a recitative vocalization. And while he read it to her slowly, Fate finessed on the third round. And so the major found them an hour or more later, he standing in the failing light turning the pages and she looking up at him, listening, with her cheek upon her interlaced fingers and her elbows resting on the old book. The old gentleman stood at the door a long time before he interrupted them and after Andrew had gone down to put Caroline into her motorcar, which had been waiting for hours, he lingered at the window looking out into the dusk. "'For love is as strong as death,'" he quoted to himself as he turned to the table and slowly closed the book and returned it to its place. "'And many waters can not quench love, neither can the floods drown it.'" "Solomon was very great--and human," he further observed. Then after absorbing an hour or two of communion with some musty old papers and a tattered volume of uncertain age, the major was interrupted by Mrs. Matilda as she came in from her drive. She was a vision in her soft gray reception gown, and her gray hat, with its white velvet rose, was tipped over her face at an angle that denoted the spirit of adventure. "I'm so glad to get back, Major," she said as she stood and regarded him with affection beaming in her bright eyes. "Sometimes I hurry home to be sure you are safe here. I don't see you as much as I do out at Seven Oaks and I'm lonely going places away from you."