“Between you and me, Alix?” he questioned in return, his fine hand tight upon hers, and his affectionate, brotherly look searching her face.

“Well, don’t you, Peter?” she countered.

“I hadn’t noticed anything, my dear, except that you are making a lonely, solitary man a very happy one,” he answered, with his grave smile.

“But that—­” she contended, with scarlet cheeks, but bravely “—­ that isn’t marriage!”

“What ought marriage be?” he smiled, half humouring her, half concerned.

For answer she looked keenly, almost wistfully, into his face.  He had noticed this look more than once of late.

“I don’t know,” she said softly, after awhile, with a little discouraged shrug of her shoulders.  “I always thought that when a man and a woman liked each other—­oh, thoroughly—­liked the same things, had everything in common, that that was enough.  And—­for the woman I was a month ago, it would have been enough, Peter!” she added in a puzzled tone.

“You’ve changed then, Mrs. Joyce?”

“That’s it,” she agreed.  “I’m not the same woman.  I couldn’t, as a girl, estimate what life was going to be as a wife.”

“Perhaps no girl can,” he suggested, interested now.

“Well, that’s just what I’m thinking, Peter!” she smiled, a little ruefully.  And again she gave him the look that was new, that was not all timid nor wistful nor appealing, yet somehow partook of all three.  “You see, you feel that nothing can change you,” she elucidated further, “and you are perfectly sure of yourself, from your old standpoint.  And then the—­well, the mental and spiritual and physical miracle of marriage does change you, and it is as if you had entered into a contract for a totally strange woman!”

She was so intent, so bright and earnest, as she turned a fire-flushed face to his, that he felt an odd moisture pricking his eyes.

“Alix,” he said, affectionately, “where do I fail you?”

For a moment she was silent, her bright eyes fixed on his.  Gradually the serious look on her face lightened, and her customary smile twitched at the corners of her mouth.

“I married you under a misapprehension,” she said.  “I thought you had about three hundred dollars a year!  It appears that you have more than that every month—­every week, for all I know—­”

“You knew my mother had that old Pacific Avenue place!” he answered with concern.  “I never for one second deceived—­”

“Oh, you idiot!” Alix laughed.  “I don’t mind being rich at all, I like it.  I don’t want to live in the city, or join women’s clubs, and all that, but I like having my own check-book—­truly, I do!  As for all the silver and portraits and rugs and things, why, we may like them some day.”

He was not listening to her; there was a sorry look in his eyes.