"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-