So they dined alone together, sharing a taciturn meal, and duly witnessed the drolleries of _The Gutta-Percha Girl_. Kennaston’s sleep afterward was sound and dreamless. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ IV Past Storisende Fares the Road of Use and Wont HE read _The Tinctured Veil_ in print, with curious wistful wonder. “How did I come to write it?” was his thought. Thereafter Felix Kennaston, as the world knows, wrote no more books, save to collect his later verses into a volume. “I am afraid to write against the author of _The Tinctured Veil_,” he was wont flippantly to declare. And a few of us suspected even then that he spoke the absolute truth. * * * * * Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. Kennaston continued their round of decorous social duties: their dinner-parties were chronicled in the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_; and Kennaston delivered, by request, two scholarly addresses before the Lichfield Woman’s Club, was duly brought forward to shake hands with all celebrities who visited the city, and served acceptably in the vestry of his church. Was Felix Kennaston content?—that is a question he alone could have answered. “But why shouldn’t I have been?” he said, a little later, in reply to the pointblank query. “I had a handsome home, two motors, money in four banks, and a good-looking wife who loved and coddled me. The third prince gets no more at the end of any fairy tale. Still, the old woman spoke the truth, of course—one pays as one goes out.... Oh, yes, one pays!—that is an inevitable rule; but what you have to pay is not exorbitant, all things considered.... So, be off with your crude pessimisms, Harrowby!” * * * * * And indeed, when one comes to think, he was in no worse case than any other husband of his standing. “Who wins his love must lose her,” as no less tunefully than wisely sings one of our poets—a married bard, you may be sure—and all experience tends to prove his warbling perfectly veracious. Romancers, from Time’s nonage, have invented and have manipulated a host of staple severances for their puppet lovers—sedulously juggling, ever since Menander’s heyday, with compromising letters and unscrupulous rivals and shipwrecks and wills and testy parents and what not—and have contrived to show love overriding these barriers plausibly enough. But he must truly be a boldfaced rhapsodist who dared at outset marry his puppets, to each other, and tell you how their love remained unchanged.