“Wait—is she coming up?” They clutched each other spasmodically as they listened to the sound of a deflecting footstep. There was a breathless moment, and then the chords of a funeral march boomed forth upon the air. The loud pedal was doing its best to supplement those long and strenuous fingers.

The listeners breathed a sigh of relief.

“He’s gone to the station for a time-table,” whispered the husband, with a delighted grin; “though I can stand him all right. We had a nice walk with the little girls, after he got tired of playing hide-and-seek. I wished you were with us. You must be about used up. How are you getting along with her?”

“Oh, pretty well.” She let herself be drawn down on the hall window seat at the top of the landing. “You see, Edith really feels dreadfully, poor girl.”

“What about?”

“Herbert, she isn’t really sure that she loves him.”

“Isn’t sure! After they’ve been engaged for a year!”

“That’s just it. She says if they had been married out of hand, in the first flush of the novelty, she wouldn’t have had time, perhaps, to have any doubts. But it’s the seeing him all the time that’s made her think.”

“Made her think what?”

“Whether she loves him or not; whether they are really suited. I remember that I used to feel that way about you, dear. Oh, you know, Herbert, it’s a very serious thing for a girl. She says she knows her whole life is at stake; she thinks about it all the time.”

“How about his?”

“Well, that’s what I said,” admitted Mrs. Belmore. “She says that she feels that he is so rational and self-poised that she makes little difference in his life either way—it has come to her all at once. She says his looking at everything in a matter-of-fact way just chills her; she longs for a whole-souled enthusiasm that can sweep everything before it. She feels that if they are married she will have to keep up the ideal for both of them, and she doesn’t know whether she can.”

“No, she can’t,” said Mr. Belmore.

“She says she could if she loved him enough,” pursued Mrs. Belmore. “It’s the if that kills her. She says that when she wakes up in the morning she feels as if she’d die if she didn’t see him before night, and when she does see him it’s all a dreadful disappointment to her; she can’t talk to him at all, she feels perfectly hard and stony; then, the moment he’s gone, she’s crazy to have him back again. She cries herself thin over it.”

“She’s pretty bony, anyway,” said Mr. Belmore impartially.

“Even his appearance changes to her. She says sometimes he looks like a Greek god, so that she could go down on her knees to him, and at other times—Once she happened to catch a glimpse of him in a horrid red sweater, polishing his shoes, and she said she didn’t get over it for weeks; he looked positively ordinary—like some of the men you see in the trolley cars.”

“Oh, good gracious!” protested Mr. Belmore feebly. “Oh, good gracious, petty! This is too much.”

“Hush—don’t laugh so loud—be quiet,” said his wife anxiously.