To-night when he heard the peals of laughter from the front door of the Stillman house he felt the sting again, and an unwarrantable childish indignation as if he had been left out of something and slighted.  He was conscious of wishing when he reached home that his wife would greet him with a frown and reproaches; in fact, with something new, instead of her sweet, gentle smile of admiration, looking up from her everlasting embroidering, from where she sat beside the sitting-room lamp.  George felt furious with her for admiring him.  He sat down moodily and took up the evening paper.  His mother was not there.  She had gone to her room early with a headache.

Finally, Lily remarked that it was a beautiful night, and it was as exactly what might have been expected from her flower-like lips as the squeaking call for mamma of a talking doll.  George almost grunted a response, and rattled his paper loudly.  Lily looked at him with a little surprise, but with unfailing love and admiration.  George had sometimes a feeling that if he were to beat her she would continue to admire him and think it lovely of him.  Lily had, in fact, the soul of an Oriental woman in the midst of New England.  She would have figured admirably in a harem.  George, being Occidental to his heart’s core, felt an exasperation the worse because it was needfully dumb, on account of this adoration.  He thought less of himself because his wife thought he could do no wrong.  The power of doing wrong is, after all, a power, and George had a feeling of having lost that power and of being in a negative way wronged.  Finally he spoke crossly to Lily over his newspaper.

“Why do you stick so to that everlasting fancy-work?” said he.  “Why on earth don’t you sometimes run out of an evening?  You never go into the next house nowadays.”

Lily arose directly.

“We will go over there now if you wish,” said she.  She laid down her work and smoothed her hair with her doll-like gesture, which never varied.

George looked at her surlily and irresolutely.

“No, I guess we had better not to-night,” he said.

“I had just as lief, dear.”

George rose, letting his paper slide to the floor.

“Well,” he said, “they are all out on the front door-step, and I think some of the neighbors are there, too.  We might run over a moment.  It is too hot to stay in the house, anyway.”

But when George and Lily came alongside the Stillman house the laughter was hushed, and there was a light in Aunt Maria’s bedroom, and lights also in the chambers behind the drawn curtains.

“We are too late,” said George.  “They have gone to bed.”

“I think they have,” replied Lily, looking up at the lighted bedroom windows.  Then she added, “I will go over there any evening you wish, dear,” and looked at him with that unfailing devotion which unreasonably angered him.

He answered her quite roughly, and was ashamed of himself afterwards.