“You bet your life,” he said, patting her shoulder.  “What would I have done, all alone, in the new house?”

“In the new house?” she cried.  “Oh, Howard—­you haven’t taken it!”

“I haven’t signed the lease,” he replied importantly, smiling down at her, and thrusting his hands in his pockets.

“I don’t want it,” said Honora; “I don’t want it.  I told you that I’d decided I didn’t want it when we were there.  Oh, Howard, why did you take it?”

He whistled.  He had the maddening air of one who derives amusement from the tantrums of a spoiled child.

“Well,” he remarked, “women are too many for me.  If there’s any way of pleasing ’em I haven’t yet discovered it.  The night before last you had to have the house.  Nothing else would do.  It was the greatest find in New York.  For the first time in months you get up for breakfast—­a pretty sure sign you hadn’t changed your mind.  You drag me to see it, and when you land me there, because I don’t lose my head immediately, you say you don’t want it.  Of course I didn’t take you seriously—­I thought you’d set your heart on it, so I wired an offer to Shorter to-day, and he accepted it.  And when I hand you this pleasant little surprise, you go right up in the air.”

He had no air of vexation, however, as he delivered this somewhat reproachful harangue in the picturesque language to which he commonly resorted.  Quite the contrary.  He was still smiling, as Santa Claus must smile when he knows he has another pack up the chimney.

“Why this sudden change of mind?” he demanded.  “It can’t be because you want to spend the winter in Quicksands.”

She was indeed at a loss what to say.  She could not bring herself to ask him whether he had been influenced by Trixton Brent.  If he had, she told herself, she did not wish to know.  He was her husband, after all, and it would be too humiliating.  And then he had taken the house.

“Have you hit on a palace you like better?” he inquired, with a clumsy attempt at banter.  “They tell me the elder Maitlands are going abroad —­perhaps we could get their house on the Park.”

“You said you couldn’t afford Mrs. Rindge’s house,” she answered uneasily, “and I—­I believed you.”

“I couldn’t,” he said mysteriously, and paused.

It seemed to her, as she recalled the scene afterwards, that in this pause he gave the impression of physically swelling.  She remembered staring at him with wide, frightened eyes and parted lips.

“I couldn’t,” he repeated, with the same strange emphasis and a palpable attempt at complacency.  “But—­er—­circumstances have changed since then.”

“What do you mean, Howard?” she whispered.

The corners of his mouth twitched in the attempt to repress a smile.

“I mean,” he said, “that the president of a trust company can afford to live in a better house than the junior partner of Dallam and Spence.”