Lois was sitting under the rays of the lamp. She wore a scarlet gown and held a piece of white embroidery in her lap. She seemed to absorb all the light in the room, and to leave the rest of it dark by contrast—her rosed cheeks, her white eyelids dropped over her work, the bronze waves of her hair melted into the gloom of the background. She was beautiful, but Justin did not care to look at her; it was even momentarily repugnant to him to do so. He sat on the edge of his chair, tapping his hat against it. She lacked the one thing that made a woman beautiful to him; absorbed as he was in his own plans, his own life he felt a loss—— Her remark about the children made him wince. He was a man who loved his children, and he had not only been obliged to lose most of the sweetness of their possession lately,—the sweetness that consists in watching the unfolding, day by day, of the flower-petals of childhood,—but when he had the rare chance of being in their society he could not enjoy it; a hitherto unsuspected capriciousness and irritation laid the precious moments waste. He could hear Zaidee’s gentle little voice repeating her mother’s perfunctory extenuation: “Poor daddy’s nervous; come away, Redge!” “I hope you’ll tell Mr. Selden that I must have a closet under the stairs,” said Lois suddenly. “He’ll put one there if he can.” “If he can! Justin, I spoke about it from the very first. I don’t want the house if he can’t put the closet in. I——” “All right. I’ve got to go now.” If he had cared to think about it, he might have wondered why she wanted him to wait for such last words as these. As the door closed behind him, she let her embroidery fall from her fingers and listened to the last sound of his footsteps echoing far into the frosty night. There was a firm directness in it as it carried him from her. The overcoat had not belied its appearance as the harbinger of prosperity and the forerunner of large expenditures—of which the house on the hill was one. The typometer was having a boom, the orders for it were phenomenal; the factory was working night and day. Even with the principle of trying to be rigidly conservative in estimates, it was hard not to count on an unvaried continuance of the miraculous; everybody knows of instances when it has continued, or seemed to. In reality, there is no such continuous miracle; a succession of adapted conditions has to be keenly worked out to produce the effect of continuity. In a sense, the Typometer Company was aware of this, and was consequently assimilating gradually smaller ventures with the main one.