"Do you like it?" she would say. "Does it make you forget 'the gentleman from Indiana' and the 'senator from Connecticut'?" "I don't want to forget them," he would reply with dogged good-humor. "They are not the kind of fellows it is safe to forget, but it makes my recollections of them more agreeable." But after a while there were times when he was not in the best of humors, and when Bertha had a fancy that he was not entirely at ease or pleased with herself. At such times his visits were brief and unsatisfactory, and she frequently discovered that he regarded her with a restless and perturbed expression, as if he was not quite certain of his own opinions of her. "He looks at me," she said to Richard, "as if he had moments of suspecting me of something." "Nonsense!" said Richard. "What could he suspect you of?" "Of nothing," she answered. "I think that was what we agreed to call it." But she never failed to shrink when the twinkling eyes rested upon her with the disturbed questioning in their glance, and the consciousness of this shrinking was very bitter to her in secret. When her guest approached her on the evening before referred to, she detected at once that he was not in a condition of mind altogether unruffled. The glances he cast on those about him were not encouraging, and the few nods of recognition he bestowed were far from cordial; his hair stood on end a trifle more aggressively than usual, and his short, stout body expressed a degree of general dissatisfaction which it was next to impossible to ignore. Bertha did not attempt to ignore it. "I will tell you something before you speak to me," she said. "Something has put you out of humor." He gave her a sharp glance, and then looked away over the heads of the crowd. "There is always enough to put a man out of humor," he said. "What a lot of people you have here to-night! What do they come for?" "I have just been telling Mr. Arbuthnot some of the reasons," she answered. "They are very few of them good ones. You came hoping to recover your spirits." "I came to look at you," he said. He was frequently blunt, but there was a bluntness about this speech which surprised her. She answered him with a laugh, however. "I am always worth looking at," she said. "And now you have seen me"-- He was looking at her by this time, and even more sharply than before. It seemed as if he was bent upon reading in her face the answer to the question he had asked of it before, but he evidently did not find it. "There's something wrong with you," he said. "I don't know what it is. I don't know what to make of you."