He told her about the game, saying a lot of things that didn't mean a thing to me, but that must have meant to her what they meant to him, because she laughed out, pleased. "Good!" she says. "You play a corking game, if I do say it. Do you know, you look a lot better than you did when you came home to dinner? I hate to see you look tired like that." "I feel fit as a fish now," says he. "There's something about an evening like that with half a dozen of 'em--it isn't the game. It's the--oh, I don't know. But it kind of--" He petered off, and she didn't make the mistake of agreeing too hard or talking about it too long. She just nodded, and pretty soon she told him some little thing about the baby. When he emptied his pipe, she said she thought she'd go to bed. But when she got up, he reached up and pulled her back in the chair again, and moved so that he set with his cheek against hers. And he says: "I've got something to tell you." She picked up his hand to lean her head on, and says, "What? Me?"--which I'd noticed was one of the little family jokes, that no family should be without a set of. "Do you know, Ellen," he said, "to-night, when I went out to go over to Beldon's, I thought you didn't like my going." "You did?" she says. "What made you think that?" "The way you spoke--or looked--or kissed me. I don't know. I imagined it, I guess," says he. "And--I've got something to own up." She just waited; and he said it out, blunt: "It made me not want to come home," says he. "Not want to come home?" she says over, startled. He nodded. "Lacy and Bright both left Beldon's before I did," he says. "I thought probably--I don't know. I imagined you were going to be polite as the deuce, the way I thought you were when I went out." "Oh," she says, "was I that?" "So when Lacy and Bright made jokes about what their wives'd say if they didn't get home, I joined in with them, and laughed at the 'apron strings.' That's what we called it." She moved a little away. "Did you do that?" she said. "Oh, Russell, I should hate that. I should think any woman would hate it." "I know," he says. "I'm dead sorry. But I wanted you to know. And, dear--" He got up and stood before her, with her hands crushed up in his. "I want you to know," he says, kind of solemn, "that the way you are about this makes me--gladder than the dickens. Not for the reason you might think--because it's going to make it easy to be away when I want to. But because--" He didn't say things very easy. Most men don't, except for their little bit of courting time. "Well, thunder," he said, "don't you see? It makes me so sure you're my _wife_--and not just married to me." She smiled up at him without saying anything, but I knew how balm and oil were curing the hurt that she thought she'd had that night when he went out. "I've always thought of our each doing things--and coming home and telling each other about them," he says, vague. "Of _my_ doing things, too?" she asks, quick.