Cis smiled back at him, her breath a little short, but her candid eyes looked into his unafraid. Whatever Cis feared or dreaded, it was nothing within the compass of Rodney’s control; to him she trusted herself completely. She leaned back in her chair, her hat in her lap, luxuriously rumpling her hair by rolling her head slightly on the chair’s plush back. Her face grew grave and sweet as her thoughts travelled onward from Rodney’s promise of lasting happiness to her own conviction that sorrow must come. It did not matter greatly as long as fundamentals held. Rodney’s “_we_” destroyed fear. Womanlike, she felt that sorrow that was shared would in itself hold a sweeter joy than happiness; that if she could lighten a burden for Rod there would be no weight in the heaviest burden upon herself. The prescience of the woman showed Cis the profound meaning of a true marriage; not, first in importance, to be happy together, but to learn to be happy in being unhappy together. “Cis, I did not know that you could look like that!” cried Rodney suddenly. They had been silent for a little space, and he was watching Cis’s changing expression with awe and wonder, unable to follow her mental processes, yet guessing their course. “You look at me so strangely, yet as if you hardly saw me.” “I see you, Rod, but farther than in that Pullman chair. How did I look at you?” Cis asked. “As if I were a baby, or a bird with a broken wing; I know you’d look like that at either of those things!” Rodney answered slowly. “I was thinking,” she said simply. “Then, afterward, I was thinking how dear and good you were to those forlorn children, and how fine it was to be good like that, yet strong and brave, and what a lovely day you’d made for me, too!” “Sweet Cicely! I don’t believe that you’ve the least suspicion of your own value!” Rodney cried, sincerely moved by her humility, which was less humility than the lack of all self-seeing. He lay back, still watching her, while she looked dreamily out of the window at the flaming trees rushing past them in units of beauty, massed into a splendid whole. He was thinking: “She has been utterly content and happy the livelong day! She will soon get around to thinking that the day was complete, and completely innocent, without Mass; I’ll have no trouble turning her away and holding her fast!”