And Arthur could jest on the subject of having no daughter. What a world! Being so thoroughly used to this man she seemed always to have been married to him, and could only dimly recall a time when she was not Mrs. Allonby, and thought of marriage as a vague and distant possibility, like death. But those dim maiden days had surely been sweeter than the married years that followed. Though he was nine years older than she, the idea that Arthur was elderly had only just occurred to her; for in those maiden days the homage of a man old enough to have lived and beaten out a path for himself in the world, had seemed a great thing. First a soldier, then for a brief while a rancher in the Far West, lastly a knight of the pen, this strong, spare, bronzed man seemed to the inexperienced girl to know everything, and to have been everywhere. To see such a man stammer and turn white and tremble at a word or a look of hers went dizzily to her head. "I suppose I must have married him out of pity," she mused, "or was it the pride of power? The important thing is that I did marry him--to be denied hats and refused sympathy; to be expected to dress on twopence ha'penny a year; to be derided for misfortune--and can't unmarry him, not even in the United States, merely because he nags when I am out of luck, and sulks whenever my head aches." Yet the remembrance of the wooing was not without charm. How the man had trembled, that sunny afternoon in the garden by the rose-beds, and how she had pretended not to know that he was trembling, while she gathered the roses and chattered about nothing, until even her powers of chattering about nothing came to an end, and she was silent, knowing that he must speak or die of it in another moment. It was then that an intrusive, short-sighted parent had come upon the scene and spoilt the climax. Arthur was to have left early next morning, and there was to be no further opportunity of being alone with him. How exciting and tragical it had been, as the day wore on and the man grew more and more distraught, and at last, as the hour of separating approached, in desperation slipped into her hand, where she sat at the piano to accompany somebody's song, a scrap of paper inscribed: "I'd crowns resign To call thee mine." And with what coolness and self-possession she had glanced at the paper held under the keyboard in one hand, while running over the keys with the other; and then, as one with a life-long experience of intrigue and plotting, had idly pencilled her reply on the same scrap, that she casually let fall, while directing the singer's attention to the music, for Arthur to pick up! "I'd gowns decline To call me thine." "It was so like her," Arthur said afterwards; "so quick and bright, and so superior to grammar." But he said that in postnuptial days.