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 veiled, correct irony. For his wife's delectation Keble rendered his playfulness ever so slightly frisky, exaggerating the caricature of himself; whereas for her, Miriam liked to persuade herself, he projected a more ironically shaded sketch of himself which amused without being distorted.

"It's such a blessing to have you here, Miriam," he confessed one evening. "I should have gone quite dotty alone with Aunt Denise; Louise and Dare would have come back and found me with a rosary around my neck, gibbering the names of saints. I believe you were sent to us by some kind providence of God to be a universal stop-gap in our strange ménage. I wonder you bear up under the strain."

She was tempted to say, "I was sent to you not by God but by Walter Windrom," but she couldn't. Nor could she smile, for his timid candor gave her a pretext for reading into his remark some depth of feeling for which the tyrant within her clamored. But she succeeded in replying, "Oh I bear up wonderfully,—so well, in fact, that if everything were to run flawlessly I think I should be selfish enough to pray for another gap, that I might stop it!"

The tyrant had forced the words into her mouth, but her anxiety was dispelled by his manner of taking them. He passed his hand over his hair and said, whimsically, sadly, "Well, I don't see any immediate prospect of gaplessness . . . I suppose most ménages are the same, if you were to explore into them. They muddle along, sometimes on an even