As at this time Nora put on long dresses and began to arrange her hair as a young lady, it occurred to Roger that he might make some change in his own appearance and reinforce his waning attractions. He was now thirty-three; he fancied he was growing stout. Bald, corpulent, middle-aged,—at this rate he should soon be shelved! He was seized with a mad desire to win back the lost graces of youth. He had a dozen interviews with his tailor, the result of which was that for a fortnight he appeared daily in a new garment. Suddenly, amid this restless longing to revise and embellish himself, he determined to suppress his whiskers. This would take off five years. He appeared, therefore, one morning, in the severe simplicity of a mustache. Nora started, and greeted him with a little cry of horror. “Don’t you like it?” he asked. She hung her head on one side and the other. “Well, no,—to be frank.” “O, of course to be frank! It will only take five years to grow them again. What is the trouble?” She gave a critical frown. “It makes you look too,—too fat; too much like Mr. Vose.” It is sufficient to explain that Mr. Vose was the butcher, who called every day in his cart, and who recently,—Roger with horror only now remembered it,—had sacrificed his whiskers to a mysterious ideal. “I am sorry!” said Roger. “It was for you I did it!” “For me!” And Nora burst into a violent laugh. “Why, my dear Nora,” cried the young man with a certain angry vehemence, “don’t I do everything in life for you?” She became grave again. Then, after much meditation, “Excuse my unfeeling levity,” she said. “You might cut off your nose, Roger, and I should like your face as well.” But this was but half comfort. “Too fat!” Her subtler sense had spoken, and Roger never encountered Mr. Vose for three months after this without wishing to attack him with one of his own cleavers. He made now an heroic attempt to scale the frowning battlements of the future. He pretended to be making arrangements for a tour in Europe, and for having his house completely remodelled in his absence; noting the while attentively the effect upon Nora of his cunning machinations. But she gave no sign of suspicion that his future, to the uttermost day, could be anything but her future too. One evening, nevertheless, an incident occurred which fatally confounded his calculations,—an evening of perfect mid-spring, full of warm, vague odors, of growing daylight, of the sense of bursting sap and fresh-turned earth. Roger sat on the piazza, looking out on these things with an opera-glass. Nora, who had been strolling in the garden, returned to the house and sat down on the steps of the portico. “Roger,” she said, after a pause, “has it never struck you as very strange that we should be living together in this way?” Roger’s heart rose to his throat. But he was loath to concede anything, lest he should concede too much. “It is not especially strange,” he said.