John wandered about the house disconsolate and dissatisfied, and made amends in curious little ways, and from John's standpoint. He opened relations with Elizabeth's family and insisted upon taking her home for a visit. Elizabeth went with him, and accepted the more than half-willing recognition of her father, who wanted to get into communication with the baby. He was offering for sale a young team and John, thinking to do a magnanimous thing, bought Patsie. Elizabeth accepted the visit and the horse without emotions of any sort, and left her husband annoyed and her family floundering in perplexity at her passive attitude toward life. At home that night he said to her sneeringly: "No matter what a man does for you, you pout, and act as if you didn't like it. If I don't offer to take you you're mad, and if I do you set around and act as if you were bored to death by having to go. What th' devil's a man to do?" "I was perfectly willing to go," was the reply, and she went on dressing Jack for bed without looking up. John cast a baffled look at her as she carried the child out of the room, and returned to his uncomfortable thoughts without trying to talk of anything else when she returned and sat down to sew. The sitting room in which they spent their evenings was in perfect order; the whole house was never so orderly, nor their table better served, but John pined for companionship. The work he had worn her out in doing was never better performed, but there was no love in the doing, and when he addressed her, though her answer was always ready and kind, there was no love in it, and he was learning that our equity in the life of another has fixed and unalterable lines of demarkation.