Nor was Mrs. Fontenette a skilful dissembler; she over-concealed things so revealingly. Then she was so helplessly enamoured and in so childish a way. I venture one of the penalties almost any woman may have to pay for bringing to the altar only the consent to be loved is to find herself, some time, at last, far from the altar, a Titania, a love's fool. Our Titania pointed us to the fact that the Baron's wife never tried to divert his mind from the one pursuit that enthralled it; and she borrowed one of our garden alleys in which to teach him--grace-hoops! He never caught one from her nor threw one that she could catch; but, ah! with her coaxing and commanding, her sweet taunting and reprimanding and his utter lack of surprise at them, how much she betrayed! Fontenette came, learned in a few throws, and was charmed with the toys--a genuine lover always takes to them kindly--but Mrs. Fontenette was by this time tired, and she never again felt rested when her husband mentioned the game. Furthermore, their countenances!--hers and the entomologist's--especially when in repose--you could read the depths of experience they had sounded, by the lines and shadows that came and went, or stayed, as one may read the depths of a bay by the passing of wind and light, day by day, over its waters--particularly if the waters are not very deep. They made painful reading. What degrees of heart-wretchedness came and went or stayed with them, we may have over--we may have underestimated. God knows. In two months Mrs. Fontenette grew visibly older and less pretty, yet more nearly beautiful; while he, by every sign, was gradually awakening back--or, shall we not say, being now first born?--to life, through the pangs of a torn mind; mind, not conscience; but pangs never of sated, always of the famished sort. XII It was he who finally put the very seal of confirmation upon both our hopes and our fears. The time was the evening of the same Sunday in whose afternoon his wife had declined those transparent spelling-lessons. A certain preacher, noted for his boldness, was drawing crowds by a series of sermons on the text "Be thou clean," and our fat neighbor and his wife took us, all six, to hear him. Their pew was well to the front and we were late, so that going down the aisle unushered, with them in the lead--husband and spouse, husband and spouse, four couples--we made a procession which became embarrassingly amusing as the preacher simultaneously closed the Scripture lesson with, "And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives with him into the ark." That has been our fat neighbor's best joke ever since, though he always says after it, "The poor Baron!" and often adds--"and poor Mrs. Fontenette! Little did we think," etc. But he has never even suspected their secret.