They must have been married rather contentedly for quite a while now, they said so little of importance at dinner and yet seemed so quietly pleased at having dinner together and so neat at understanding half sentences without asking explanations. That would have been the first conclusion of anybody who had been able to take out a wall and watch their doll-house unobserved. Besides, though the short, decided man with the greyish hair must be fifty at least, the woman who stood his own height when she rose from the table was too slimly mature for anything but the thirties. Not a highly original New York couple by any means--a prospering banker or president of a Consolidated Toothpick Company with a beautiful wife, American matron-without-children model, except for her chin which was less dimpled than cleft with decisiveness and the wholly original lustre of her hair, a buried lustre like the shine of “Murray's red gold” in a Border ballad. A wife rather less society-stricken than the run of such wives since she obviously preferred hot August in a New York apartment with her husband's company to beach-picnics at Greenwich or Southampton without it. Still the apartment, though compact as an army mess-kit, was perfectly furnished and the maid who had served the cool little dinner an efficient effacedness of the race that housekeepers with large families and little money assert passed with the Spanish War. Money enough, and the knowledge of how to use it without blatancy or pinching--that would have been the second conclusion. They were sitting in deep chairs in the living room now, a tall-stemmed reading lamp glowing softly between them, hardly speaking. The tiredness that had been in the man's face like the writing in a 'crossed' letter began to leave it softly. He reached over, took the woman's hand and held it--not closely or with greediness but with a firm clasp that had something weary like appeal in it and something strong like a knowledge of rest. “Always like this, at home,” he said slowly. “It _is_ rather sweet.” Her voice had the gentleness of water running into water. Her eyes looked at him once and left him deliberately but not as if they didn't care. It must have been a love-match in the beginning then--her eyes seemed so infirm. “You'll read a little?” “Yes.” “Home,” he said. He seemed queerly satisfied to say the word, queerly moved as if even after so much reality had been lived through together, he couldn't quite believe that it was reality. “And I've been waiting for it--five days, six days, this time?” She must have been at the seashore after all--tan or lack of it meant little these days, especially to a woman who lived in this kind of an apartment. The third conclusion might have been rather sentimental, a title out of a moving picture--something about Even in the Wastes of the Giant City the Weary Heart Will Always Turn To--Just Home.