“I thought I wouldn’t say it before _her_—but why don’t you and Mr. Stone make a call at the Lalors to-night? Will has a little business with Mr. Lalor, and I’ll go with him. _Do_ come.” “Well, I’ll see,” temporized Mrs. Stone with a softening inflection. Mrs. Stone was, as her hostess well knew, the kind of a person who, after disapproving publicly of a neighbour, privately sends her pickles. She hastened down the steps now to join her friend, her large, mannish figure in the overcoat and cap wobbling ludicrously on the narrow, slippery length of drift-bordered sidewalk under the gas-lamps that were already lighted. The wind had gone down, but so had the mercury; the air was “bitter chill.” As Mrs. Laurence turned back into her hall the atmosphere there seemed only a few degrees warmer. Gas logs made but slight impression on the general temperature of a house in this weather; the hand that she held over the register received but the faintest, scarce-warm breath upon it. Mrs. Laurence still looked for a belated rattling coal-wagon, but the hour seemed long until her husband’s return; her heart bounded romantically at the sound of his footsteps now, just as it had done when she was a girl. His face was ruefully smiling as he said after the kiss of greeting: “You don’t know what you’ve missed—all my fault, too! I bought you a two-dollar bunch of violets—— _Now wait_ till I get through—and left them in the train.” “Oh, _Will_!” His wife’s brows drooped tragically. “That’s so like you! You’re getting too absent-minded to live. My lovely violets!” she mourned tenderly. “Isn’t the house very cold to-night?” “Well, I should _think_ it might be! It’s freezing.” Mrs. Laurence’s accumulated wrath poured forth. “There hasn’t been a sign of the coal you ordered this morning, and I’ve been waiting for it all day. It’s a perfect outrage, and I want you to tell Harner so, Will. You _did_ order it, didn’t you?” “Why, ye——” An extraordinary expression stole over Mr. Laurence’s thin face, it was as if his consciousness had been suddenly arrested in mid-air. Well as his wife knew his expressions and what they covered, this surprisingly baffled her. He drummed with his finger-tips on the edge of the dressing-table before relaxing enough to say guardedly, after a moment: “By George! I don’t believe I did. I knew there was _something_—I’m awfully sorry, Anna, indeed I am.”