"Nonsense!" was the gruff exclamation. "The idea of talking business with you. That would be a joke, wouldn't it?" He spoke banteringly, with no perception of the gravity in his wife's desire to share in this phase of his life. But he looked up from the papers after a moment into his wife's face. She had turned from him, and then had reclined wearily in the chair opposite him, whence she had been staring at him with a tormenting feeling of impotence. The expression on her face was such that Hamilton realized her distress, without having any clue to its cause. "Now, sweetheart, what's wrong?" he questioned. He was half-sympathetic over her apparent misery, half-annoyed. Cicily, with the intuitive sensitiveness of a woman to recognize a lover's hostile feeling beneath the spoken words, was acutely conscious of the annoyance; she ignored the modicum of sympathy. To conceal her hurt, she had resort to a fictitious gaiety that was ill calculated, however, to deceive, for the stress of her disappointment was very great. "The matter with me?" she repeated, with an assumption of surprise. "Why, the matter with me is that I'm so happy--that's all!" "Cicily!" Now, at last, the husband was both shocked and grieved over his wife's mood. "Yes, that's it--happy!" the suffering girl repeated. "Why, I'm so happy--just so happy--that I could scream!" Hamilton leaned forward in his chair, to regard his wife scrutinizingly. He was filled with alarm over the nervous, almost hysterical, condition in which he now beheld her. "Cicily, are you well?" he asked. There was a distinct quaver of fear in his voice. "You look--strange, somehow." "Oh, not at all!" came the flippant retort. "It's merely that you haven't really taken a good look at me lately--until just this minute. So, of course, I'd look a bit strange to you." It must be remembered that Hamilton, although usually intelligent, had a clear conscience and no suspicion whatsoever as to any culpability on his part in his relations with his wife: thus it was that now he was wholly impervious to the sarcasm of her reference, which he answered with the utmost seriousness. "My dear, I saw you this morning, last night--oh, heaps of times, every day." "Oh, your physical eyes have seen; but your mind, your heart, your soul--the true you--hasn't seen me for I don't know how long." This cryptic explanation was too subtle for Hamilton to grasp while yet his brain was fogged by the intricacies of his business affairs. He gazed on his wife in puzzled fashion for a few seconds, then abandoned the problem as one altogether beyond his solving. To clear up a vague suspicion that this might be some new astonishing display of a woman's indirect wiles, he put a question: "My dear, do you want a new automobile, or a doctor?" "Neither!" came the crisp reply; and for once the musical voice was almost harsh, "I want a husband!"