“Howard,” she said, “weren’t you worried?”

“Worried?  No, why should I have been?  Lula Chandos and May Barclay had seen you in the automobile in town, and I knew you were high and dry somewhere.”

“High and dry,” she repeated.  What?”

“Nothing.  They said I had run off with Mr. Brent, didn’t they?”

He laughed.

“Yes, there was some joking to that effect.”

“You didn’t take it seriously?

“No—­why should I?”

She was appalled by his lack of knowledge of her.  All these years she had lived with him, and he had not grasped even the elements of her nature.  And this was marriage!  Trixton Brent—­short as their acquaintance had been—­had some conception of her character and possibilities her husband none.  Where was she to begin?  How was she to tell him the episode in the automobile in order that he might perceive something of its sinister significance?

Where was she to go to be saved from herself, if not to him?

“I might have run away with him, if I had loved him,” she said after a pause.  “Would you have cared?”

“You bet your life,” said Howard, and put his arm around her.

She looked up into his face.  So intent had she been on what she had meant to tell him that she did not until now perceive he was preoccupied, and only half listening to what she was saying.

“You bet your life,” he said, patting her shoulder.  “What would I have done, all alone, in the new house?”

“In the new house?” she cried.  “Oh, Howard—­you haven’t taken it!”

“I haven’t signed the lease,” he replied importantly, smiling down at her, and thrusting his hands in his pockets.

“I don’t want it,” said Honora; “I don’t want it.  I told you that I’d decided I didn’t want it when we were there.  Oh, Howard, why did you take it?”

He whistled.  He had the maddening air of one who derives amusement from the tantrums of a spoiled child.

“Well,” he remarked, “women are too many for me.  If there’s any way of pleasing ’em I haven’t yet discovered it.  The night before last you had to have the house.  Nothing else would do.  It was the greatest find in New York.  For the first time in months you get up for breakfast—­a pretty sure sign you hadn’t changed your mind.  You drag me to see it, and when you land me there, because I don’t lose my head immediately, you say you don’t want it.  Of course I didn’t take you seriously—­I thought you’d set your heart on it, so I wired an offer to Shorter to-day, and he accepted it.  And when I hand you this pleasant little surprise, you go right up in the air.”

He had no air of vexation, however, as he delivered this somewhat reproachful harangue in the picturesque language to which he commonly resorted.  Quite the contrary.  He was still smiling, as Santa Claus must smile when he knows he has another pack up the chimney.

“Why this sudden change of mind?” he demanded.  “It can’t be because you want to spend the winter in Quicksands.”