“I’m afraid it’s impossible,” said Arthur regretfully. “The president made a point of my attending the meeting. I am sorrier than you can be, little wife.” She shook her head and tried to laugh. “That shows how little you know about it! Don’t make any more engagements without consulting me. ‘I’m ower young’—not ‘to leave my mammy yet’—but to be running about the world without my dear, old, steady-going husband—and I’m not willing to do it any longer.” He carried the memory of words and glance with him all day. Coming home at evening, he found a note from her, stating that Kitty had sent for her. “There is a dress rehearsal at seven,” she wrote. “I wish you could be there and see how ravishing I can be! If your business meeting is over by ten o’clock, won’t you slip into society toggery and come around in season to see ‘the old lady’ home?” “The fever has run its course!” thought the husband, with kindling eyes. “I knew I should get her back some day.” His dinner was less carefully served than in the olden supper days, but he dined as with the gods, and ran briskly upstairs to send Ellen down to her meal while he undressed the children and put them to bed. He had done this often during the winter, pretending to make a joke of the disrobing, but knowing it to be duty and vicarious. According to his ideas the mother should see to it in person. No hireling, whose own the bairns are not, can care for them as those in whose veins runs answering kindred blood. Usually, the task was done in heaviness of spirit. To-night, no effort was required to bring laughter to his lips, lightness to his heart. To-morrow mamma would breakfast with them, and resume her place in the home, so poorly filled by him or anybody else. She had come back to them. He tried to sing one of her lullabies as he rocked the baby to sleep, but failed by reason of a “catch in his throat.” Mamma would warble it like a nightingale to them to-morrow night. The business meeting was unexpectedly brief—“Thanks,” as the president was pleased to say, “to the admirable epitome of the matter in hand prepared and presented by Mr. Cornell.” At ten o’clock the husband was in his dressing room, hurrying the process of “slipping into society toggery.” He repeated the phrase aloud while tying his cravat with fingers uncertain from nervous haste. He was thankful beyond expression that he had never cast the shadow of his disapproval over Susie’s spirits, even when they threatened to carry her out of the bounds of reason. She was young and pretty; so affluent of vitality, so richly endowed with talents, that a humdrum fellow like himself could not comprehend the stress of the temptation to plunge into and riot in the mad vortex of social parade. “If there were any one thing I could do as cleverly as she does everything, I should be doing it all the time,” he confessed in contrite candor.