But she persisted, gently.  “Keep the downstairs room, dear, just as it is.  Don’t make it a public room, except for necessity.  Sometimes you’ll be glad to take refuge there, just as you’re used to doing.  Leave those three pictures on your walls, and look at them often, as you’ve always done.  And be sure of this, Red:  I shall never be hurt when you show me that you want to fight something out alone, there.  It must be your own and private place, just as if I hadn’t come.”

Sober now, he stood looking straight down into her eyes, which gave him back his look as straightly.  After a minute he spoke with feeling: 

“Thank you, dearest.  And bless you for understanding so well.  At the same time I’m confident you understand one thing more:  That by leaving a man his liberty you surely hold him tightest!”

CHAPTER III

BURNS DOES HIS DUTY

“Excuse me for coming in on you at breakfast,” Martha Macauley, Ellen’s sister and next-door neighbour, apologized, one morning in late May.  “But I wanted to catch Red before he got away, and I saw, for a wonder, that there was no vehicle before the door.”

“Come in, come in,” urged Burns, while Ellen smiled a greeting at her sister, a round-faced, fair-haired, energetic young woman, as different as possible from Ellen’s own type.  “Have a chair.”  He rose to get it for her, napkin in hand.  “Will you sit down and try one of Cynthia’s magnificent muffins?”

“No, thank you.  And I’ll plunge into my errand, for I know at any minute you may jump up and run away.  You may, anyway, when you hear what I want!  Promise me, Red, that you won’t go until you’ve heard me out.”

“What a reputation I have for speed at escape!” But Burns glanced at his watch as he spoke.  “Fire away, Martha.  Five minutes you shall have—­and I’m afraid no more.  I’m due at the hospital in half an hour.”

“Well, I want to give a reception for you.”  Martha took the plunge.  “I know you hate them, but Ellen doesn’t,—­at least, she knows such things are necessary, no matter how much you may wish they weren’t.  I don’t mean a formal reception, of course.  I know how you both feel about trying to ape city society customs, in a little suburban village like this.  But I do think, since you had such a quiet wedding, you ought to give people a chance to come in and greet you, as a newly married pair.”

Burns’s eyes met his wife’s across the table.  There was a comical look of dismay in his face.  “I thought,” said he, “you and I agreed to cut out all that sort of thing.  As for being a newly married pair—­we aren’t.  We’ve been married since the beginning of time.  I can’t conceive of existence apart from Mrs. Redfield Pepper Burns, nor recall any period of my life when she wasn’t a part of it.”

“You’ve been married just seven weeks and three days, however,” retorted his sister-in-law, with a touch of impatience, though she smiled, “and not a quarter of the people in town have ever met Ellen.  You’ll find that it’s not the same, now that you’re married.  They won’t flock to your office, just out of admiration for you, unless you show them some attention.”