“Ouch!” said Patricia; “you are tickling me.  You don’t shave half as often as you used to, do you?  No, nowadays you think you have me safe and don’t have to bother about being attractive.  If I had a music-box I could put your face into it and play all sorts of tunes, only I prefer to look at it.  You are a slattern and a jay-bird and a joy forever.  And besides, the first Stapleton seems to have blundered somehow into the House of Burgesses, so that entitles me to be a Colonial Dame on my father’s side, too, doesn’t it, Olaf?”

The colonel laughed.  “Madam Vanity!” said he, “I repeat that to be descended of a line of czars or from a house of emperors is, at the worst, an empty braggartism, or, at best—­upon the plea of heredity—­a handy palliation for iniquity; and to be descended of sturdy and honest and clean-blooded folk is beyond doubt preferable, since upon quite similar grounds it entitles one to hope that even now, ’when their generation is gone, when their play is over, when their panorama is withdrawn in tatters from the stage of the world,’ there may yet survive of them ’some few actions worth remembering, and a few children who have retained some happy stamp from the disposition of their parents.’”

Patricia—­with eyes widened in admiration at his rhetoric,—­had turned an enticing shade of pink.

“I am glad of that,” she said.

She snuggled so close he could not see her face now.  She was to all appearances attempting to twist the top-button from his coat.

“I am very glad that it entitles one to hope—­about the children—­Because—­”

The colonel lifted her a little from him.  He did not say anything.  But he was regarding her half in wonder and one-half in worship.

She, too, was silent.  Presently she nodded.

He kissed her as one does a very holy relic.

It was a moment to look back upon always.  There was no period in Rudolph Musgrave’s life when he could not look back upon this instant and exult because it had been his.

* * * * *

Only, Patricia found out afterward, with an inexplicable disappointment, that her husband had not been talking extempore, but was freely quoting his “Compiler’s Foreword” just as it figured in the printed book.

One judges this posturing, so inevitable of detection, to have been as significant of much in Rudolph Musgrave as was the fact of its belated discovery characteristic of Patricia.

Yet she had read this book about her family from purely normal motives:  first, to make certain how old her various cousins were; secondly, to gloat over any traces of distinction such as her ancestry afforded; thirdly, to note with what exaggerated importance the text seemed to accredit those relatives she did not esteem, and mentally to annotate each page with unprintable events “which everybody knew about”; and fourthly, to reflect, as with a gush of steadily augmenting love, how dear and how unpractical it was of Olaf to have concocted these date-bristling pages—­so staunch and blind in his misguided gratitude toward those otherwise uninteresting people who had rendered possible the existence of a Patricia.