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 merely marking time as best she could, not knowing in the least where they stood, what they felt, or whether William loved her or not. More and more the condition of Mary’s mind seemed to her wonderful and enviable—if, indeed, it could be quite as she figured it—if, indeed, simplicity existed for any one of the daughters of women.

“Swift,” she said, at last, taking out a volume at haphazard to settle this question at least. “Let us have some Swift.”

Rodney took the book, held it in front of him, inserted one finger between the pages, but said nothing. His face wore a queer expression of deliberation, as if he were weighing one thing with another, and would not say anything until his mind were made up.

Katharine, taking her chair beside him, noted his silence and looked at him with sudden apprehension. What she hoped or feared, she could not have said; a most irrational and indefensible desire for some assurance of his affection was, perhaps, uppermost in her mind. Peevishness, complaints, exacting cross-examination she was used to, but this attitude of composed quiet, which seemed to come from the consciousness of power within, puzzled her. She did not know what was going to happen next.

At last William spoke.

“I think it’s a little odd, don’t you?” he said, in a voice of detached reflection. “Most people, I mean, would be seriously upset if their marriage was put off for six months or so. But we aren’t; now how do you account for that?”

She looked at him and observed his judicial attitude as of one holding far aloof from emotion.

“I attribute it,” he went on, without waiting for her to answer, “to the fact that neither of us is in the least romantic about the other. That may be partly, no doubt, because we’ve known each other so long; but