She lifted her head and looked at him.  She dared him.  The curls on her forehead danced and the amethyst eardrops twinkled; the shrug of her shoulders brought the mauve ribbons again under his notice.

“As I told you, I’m going into accounts with you this evening.”

“Oh, well ... it’s your own affair.”

“But husbands like to make wives’ affairs their own, don’t they?”

She rose to find her account-books in a pigeon-hole of the bureau.  Her colour had faded; her eyes were bright.  Like all women she feared the hour of battle, while she did not flinch from it.  So pretty she looked, standing there, that Osborn sprang up after her.  He was just man—­not husband, not master, nor judge, nor timekeeper of the home; but man, admiring and passionate.

“I say, hang the accounts!  Come to me!”

There was again that about her which checked him.  It was an almost virginal aloofness, though he would not have known how so to define it.  When she sat down once more by his side he reached for his pipe again calmly and put it between his teeth, clenching them hard on the stem.

“Well, pretty cat?” he asked in a strained voice.

The old love-name fell upon cold ears.  Opening the first book, she mused busily: 

“This is the housekeeping; the other’s odd expenses.  But I’d better finish telling you about mother’s will first.  She left me two hundred and twenty pounds a year.”

This time he made no sign at the news, except by raising his eyebrows and directing towards her a steady look of interest and inquiry.

“So,” she continued, “we have been quite well off.  Directly you left I reckoned up our expenses and found we were better off than before, on two hundred a year, and I got a charwoman.  I told you the first part of the year was like a half-holiday.  After my dear mother died and I had the money, I engaged Ann.”

“Quite right,” he said rather gruffly.

“I am like you, Osborn, I have had a great year.  If it hadn’t meant losing mother it would have been a perfect year.”

After a long pause, he dropped out, incredulously: 

“Without me?”

She felt her hands grow suddenly cold with fear of the battle.

“Yes,” she nodded, “without you.”

As he looked at her she was again as dazzling to him as a beautiful stranger; and as strange.

He said somewhat stiffly:  “That’s not exactly what a man expects to hear when he comes back after a long time.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’ve changed somehow.  What’s the matter?”

“I’ve grown young again.  That’s all, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know if that’s all.”

“Let’s talk of something else,” she said gaily; “tell me more about yourself.  I’ve had no details yet, and I’m longing for them.  You’re keeping the job, are you?  And just what good things does keeping it mean?”

“A fur coat for Marie,” he said with a hint of reproachful pathos.