She stood in the doorway, looking in spite of the autumn sun and the walk up from the corn-field, deliriously cool. She fanned herself with a broad rhubarb-leaf--an impromptu fan plucked by the way. She sat down on the ledge of the upper step of Ralph's study, as she often did when she worked or rested. Ralph was again within, reclining on a window-seat, while the pack of reckless banditti swarmed over him. "Have the rhymes been behaving themselves this morning?" Winsome said, looking across at Ralph as only a wife of some years' standing can look at her husband--with love deepened into understanding, and tempered with a spice of amusement and a wide and generous tolerance--the look of a loving woman to whom her husband and her husband's ways are better than a stage play. Such a look is a certificate of happy home and an ideal life, far more than all heroics. The love of the after-years depends chiefly on the capacity of a wife to be amused by her husband's peculiarities--and not to let him see it. "There are three blanks," said Ralph, a little wistfully. "I have written a good deal, but I dare not read it over, lest it should be nothing worth." This was a well-marked stage in Ralph's composition, and it was well that his wife had come. "I fear you have been dreaming, instead of working," she said, looking at him with a kind of pitying admiration. Ralph, too, had grown handsomer, so his wife thought, since she had him to look after. How, indeed, could it be otherwise? She rose and went towards him. "Sun down, now, children, and play on the grass," she said. "Sun, chicks--off with you--shoo!" and she flirted her apron after them as she did when she scattered the chickens from the dairy door. The pinafored people fled shrieking across the grass, tumbling over each other in riotous heaps. Then Winsome went over and kissed her husband. He was looking so handsome that he deserved it. And she did not do it too often. She was glad that she had made him wear a beard. She put one of her hands behind his head and the other beneath his chin, tilting his profile with the air of a connoisseur. This can only be done in one position. "Well, does it suit your ladyship?" said Ralph. She gave him a little box on the ear. "I knew," he said, "that you wanted to come and sit on my knee!" "I never did," replied Winsome with animation, making a statement almost certainly inaccurate upon the face of it. "That's why you sent away the children," he went on, pinching her ear. "Of all things in this world," said Winsome indignantly, "commend me to a man for conceit!" "And to winsome wives for wily ways!" said her husband instantly. To do him justice, he did not often do this sort of thing. "Keep the alliteration for the poems," retorted Winsome. "Truth will do for me." After a little while she said, without apparent connection: "It is very hot." "What are they doing in the hay-field?" asked Ralph.