"They are the best friends I have on earth," he said, when Myra went to the door with him, "but somehow, I feel as if I didn't want to meet anybody I know,--not to-night. I want to have it all to myself for a few hours." She laughed at that; a laugh with an upbubbling of content and pure happiness in it; and sent him off with his heart afire. When he was halfway down the walk she recalled him. He came back obediently. "It will cost you something every time you do that," he protested, exacting the penalty. "Was that what you wanted?" "Of course not! I merely wanted to ask you what it is to 'owl' a person. You said I 'owled' you." "Did I? Well, you don't; you never can. That is the best definition I can think of: something you can never do to me. May I say good-night again? the way I did a minute ago?" The glare of the arc-light swinging between its poles across the avenue was quite ruthless, and there were passers-by in straggling procession on the sidewalk. But at the critical instant the kindly incandescence burned blue, clicked, fizzed, and died down to a red spot in the darkness. For which cause Bartrow presently went his way, with the heart-fire upblazing afresh; and when Myra won back to the library and the cosy depths of the great chair, the color scheme of fair neck and cheek and brow was not altogether the reflection from the crimson shade of the reading-lamp. CHAPTER XXVII CONSTANCE TO MYRA MY DEAR LADY BOUNTIFUL: Your letter--the ridiculous one--came yesterday. The idea of your proposing in the very morning of your honey-month to take the Colfax Avenue house and turn it into a home for indigent relatives! As Tommie would put it, "Wot are you givin' us!" But seriously, cuzzy dear, it's quite out of the question. Papa wouldn't hear to it, and besides, we are getting along very cosily now, re-learning a good many lessons that prosperity makes one forget. One of them is that gratitude isn't quite like the dodo,--gone into fossilistic extinction, you know. Margaret Gannon is one of the instances. She has taken a room in our block, and there is no limit to her great Irish tender-heartedness. If I'd let her, she would make me sit down and hold my hands while she does the housework of our three rooms. In spite of all I can say or do, she does do a great deal of it; and I can hear her sewing-machine buzzing deep into the night to pay for it. Tommie is another. The day we moved down here from the old home in Colfax Avenue that "irreclaimable little savage," as you once called him, brought me his surplus of a dollar and something and asked me to "blow it in" for him. Think of it and weep, you luxury-spoiled darling! I could have hugged him, dirt and all. And since that day he has been my Ariel, in more ways than you would think possible. He is so sharp and keen-witted; and his philanthropy has developed into a passion.