"Oh, didn't he think it very silly?" she entreated, fondly. "Don't you think he'll laugh at you for it!" "Very likely. But he won't like me the less for it. Men are glad of marital devotion in other men; they feel that it acts as a sort of dispensation for them." "You oughtn't to waste those things on me," she said, humbly. "You ought to keep them for your plays." "Oh, they're not wasted, exactly. I can use them over again. I can say much better things than that with a pen in my hand." She hardly heard him. She felt a keen remorse for something she had meant to do and to say when he came home. Now she put it far from her; she thought she ought not to keep even an extinct suspicion in her heart against him, and she asked, "Brice, did you know that woman was living in this house?" "What woman?" Louise was ashamed to say anything about the smouldering eyes. "That woman on the bathing-beach at Magnolia--the one I met the other day." He said, dryly: "She seems to be pursuing us. How did you find it out?" She told him, and she added, "I think she _must_ be an actress of some sort." "Very likely, but I hope she won't feel obliged to call because we're connected with the profession." Some time afterwards Louise was stitching at a centre-piece she was embroidering for the dining-table, and Maxwell was writing a letter for the _Abstract_, which he was going to send to the editor with a note telling him that if it were the sort of thing he wanted he would do the letters for them. "After all," she breathed, "that look of the eyes may be purely physical." "What look?" Maxwell asked, from the depths of his work. She laughed in perfect content, and said: "Oh, nothing." But when he finished his letter, and was putting it into the envelope, she asked: "Did you tell Mr. Grayson that Godolphin had returned the play?" "No, I didn't. That wasn't necessary at this stage of the proceedings." "No." XIV.