Justin started—it was the voice of his wife. He came back to the familiar region of warm human love with a glad bound of relief so instantaneous that he had not even shame for his abnormal wanderings; they became already as though they had never been as he answered: “Yes; I couldn’t have slept if I had gone to bed.” “But you’re all cold sitting by that window, with the night air blowing in on you!” Her hands had found out that fact in the darkness as they closed around his neck. “Shut the window at once! You’re so imprudent. You must remember that it isn’t summer now.” She lent herself to his embrace for a moment. “Do you know how late it is?” “No, and I don’t want to. Let’s sit here together for a little while, I’m unspeakably wide awake! I’ll make up a little fire for a few minutes and we’ll have a midnight talk.” She laughed with evident pleasure. “Well!” He took a match out of his pocket and, kneeling down on the hearth, lighted the small pine logs which were piled up there. A sudden flame brought into bold relief his sinewy frame and clear-cut features as he leaned forward—the light, waving hair pushed upward, and the strong set mouth and chin. His wife drew a low chair forward by him and put out her bare feet in their pink Turkish slippers to catch the warmth. When he turned, the flame had caught her also in its flaring light, and rose and wavered and fell around her. It used to be the fashion in the old story-books to represent the parents of even the youngest infant as people of mature age and didactic wisdom; to be a mother was to be removed forever from the precincts of social vanities or young and active living. One can find in the books of fifty years ago the picture of a woman, austerely middle-aged, with banded hair, a cap, a long nose, and a kerchief, dispensing advice to abnormally small children in trousers and pinafores who cluster at her knees. Lois Alexander would have been a revelation to that epoch; with her white lace-frilled draperies wrapped around her and her pink-slippered feet, she might have served as a distinctly modern illustration of youthful motherhood. She was not very tall, but gave the effect of height in her bearing. Her form was beautifully rounded and her throat and neck were of a soft whiteness peculiarly their own. Everything about her was richly colored—her lips, her cheeks, her blue eyes, which had a certain rayed starriness in them, and her brown hair, which, when it lay, as now, unfastened, fell in large loose curls upon her bosom. Her usual expression was somewhat pensive and absorbed, as if she were thinking of herself; but when she smiled she seemed to think only of you. She put a soft detaining hand on his shoulder as he bent forward watching the blaze in a new absorption. “I know you’re thinking of the new venture.” “Yes; it’s a good deal to think of.”