For a moment, as Peggy Blackton went to her husband, he stood very close to Joanne, and into his eyes she was smiling, half laughing, her beautiful mouth aquiver, her eyes glowing, the last trace of their old suspense and fear vanished in a new and wondrous beauty.  He would not have said she was twenty-eight now.  He would have sworn she was twenty.

“Joanne,” he whispered, “you are wonderful.  Your hair is glorious!”

“Always—­my hair,” she replied, so low that he alone heard.  “Can you never see beyond my hair, John Aldous?”

“I stop there,” he said.  “And I marvel.  It is glorious!”

“Again!” And up from her white throat there rose a richer, sweeter colour.  “If you say that again now, John Aldous, I shall never make curls for you again as long as I live!”

“For me——­”

His heart seemed near bursting with joy.  But she had left him, and was laughing with Peggy Blackton, who was showing her husband where he had missed a stubbly patch of beard on his cheek.  He caught her eyes, turned swiftly to him, and they were laughing at him, and there came a sudden pretty upturn to her chin as he continued to stare, and he saw again the colour deepening in her face.  When Peggy Blackton led her husband to the stair, and drove him up to shave off the stubbly patch, Joanne found the opportunity to whisper to him: 

“You are rude, John Aldous!  You must not stare at me like that!”

And as she spoke the rebellious colour was still in her face, in spite of the tantalizing curve of her red lips and the sparkle in her eyes.

“I can’t help it,” he pleaded.  “You are—­glorious!”

During the next hour, and while they were at supper, he could see that she was purposely avoiding his eyes, and that she spoke oftener to Paul Blackton than she did to him, apparently taking the keenest interest in his friend’s enthusiastic descriptions of the mighty work along the line of steel.  And as pretty Peggy Blackton never seemed quite so happy as when listening to her husband, he was forced to content himself by looking at Joanne most of the time, without once receiving her smile.

The sun was just falling behind the western mountains when Peggy and Joanne, hurried most incontinently by Blackton, who had looked at his watch, left the table to prepare themselves for the big event of the evening.

“I want to get you there before dusk,” he explained.  “So please hurry!”

They were back in five minutes.  Joanne had slipped on a long gray coat, and with a veil that trailed a yard down her back she had covered her head.  Not a curl or a tress of her hair had she left out of its filmy prison, and there was a mischievous gleam of triumph in her eyes when she looked at Aldous.

A moment later, when they went ahead of Blackton and his wife to where the buckboard was waiting for them, he said: 

“You put on that veil to punish me, Ladygray?”