dinner. I don't care!" Her manner bore a foreign trace of abandon in
its radiant happiness; and, with spread fingers on his back, she
propelled him toward the stairs. But, in their room, he failed to
change his clothes: he sat lost in a concentration of thought, of
summoned determination.

The interior, with dotted white Swiss curtains at the large windows,
both an anomaly and an improvement on the architectural origin, was
furnished largely in dull rubbed mahogany, the beds had high slender
fluted posts, snowy ruffled canopies and counterpanes stitched in a
primitive design. He possessed an inlaid chest of drawers across from
the graceful low-boy used by Fanny as a dressing-table; there was a bed
stand with brass-tipped feet, a Duncan Fyfe, she declared; split
hickory chairs painted a dark claret color; small hooked rugs on the
waxed floor; and, against the mirror on his chest of drawers, a big
photograph of Fanny and the two children in the window-seat of the
living room.

A dinner shirt lay in readiness on the bed, the red morocco boxes that
held his moonstone cuff links and studs were evident, but he ignored
those provisions for his ease. There was a strange, a different and
unaccountable, uneasiness, a marked discomfort, at his heart. The
burden of it was that he had a very great deal of which, it might well
be, he wasn't worthy. In Fanny, he told himself, as against everything
else discoverable, he had the utmost priceless security life could
offer. Outside the brightness and warmth and charm of their house the
November night was slashed by a black homeless wind.

Her sureness, undeniably, was founded on the inalterable strength of
her convictions; against that sustaining power, it occurred to him, the