Norma was angry, ashamed, and afraid, all at once. For twenty feet they walked in silence. She stole more than one anxious look at her companion; Wolf's face was set like flint. He was buttoned into the familiar old overcoat, a tall, brown, clean-shaven, and just now scowling young man of the accepted American type, firm of jaw, keen of eye, and with a somewhat homely bluntness of feature preventing him from being describable as handsome, or with at best a rough, hard, open-eyed sort of handsomeness that was as unconscious of itself as the beauty of a young animal. "Wolf, don't be cross," his wife pleaded, in illogical coaxing. "I'm not cross," he said, with an annoyed glance that humiliated and angered her. "But I don't like this sort of thing, Norma, and I should think you'd know why." "What sort of thing?" Norma countered, quickly. "The sort of thing that evidently Mr. Christopher Liggett thinks is fair play!" Wolf said, with youthful bitterness. "Harry saw you both walking up Fifth Avenue yesterday, and Joe Anderson happened to mention that you and a man were lunching together on Thursday, down at the Lafayette. There may be no harm in it----" "There _may_ be!" Norma echoed, firing. "You know very well there _isn't_!" "You see him every day," Wolf said. "I _don't_ see him every day! But if I did, it wouldn't be Harry Redding's and Joe Anderson's business!" "No," Wolf said, more mildly, "but it might be mine!" Norma realized that he was softening under her distress, and she changed her tone. "Wolf, you know that you can trust me!" she said. "But I don't know anything about him!" Wolf reminded her. "I know that he's twice your age----" "He's thirty-eight!" "Thirty-eight, then--and I know that he's a loafer--a rich man who has nothing else to do but run around with women----" "I want to ask you to stop talking about something of which you are entirely ignorant!" Norma interrupted, hotly. "You're the one that's ignorant, Norma," Wolf said, stubbornly, not looking at her. "You are only a little girl; you think it's great fun to be married to one man, and flirting with another! What makes me sick is that a man like Liggett thinks he can get away with it, and you women----" "If you say that again, I'll not walk with you!" Norma burst in furiously. "Does it ever occur to you," Wolf asked, equally roused, "that you are my wife?"