Page:Watch and Ward (Boston, Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1878).djvu/60

Rh him with a little cry of horror. "Don't you like it?" he asked. She hung her head on one side and the other. "Well, no,—to be frank."

"O, of course to be frank! It will only take five years to grow them again. What is the trouble?"

She gave a critical frown. "It makes you look too,—too fat; too much like Mr. Vose." It is sufficient to explain that Mr. Vose was the butcher, who called every day in his cart, and who recently,—Roger with horror only now remembered it,—had sacrificed his whiskers to a mysterious ideal.

"I am sorry!" said Roger. "It was for you I did it!"

"For me!" And Nora burst into a violent laugh.

"Why, my dear Nora," cried the young man with a certain angry vehemence, "don't I do everything in life for you?"

She became grave again. Then, after much meditation, "Excuse my unfeeling levity," she said. "You might cut off your nose, Roger, and I should like your face as well." But this was but half comfort. "Too fat!" Her subtler sense had spoken, and Roger never encountered Mr. Vose for three months after this without wishing to attack him with one of his own cleavers.

He made now an heroic attempt to scale the frowning battlements of the future. He pretended to be making arrangements for a tour in Europe, and for having his house completely remodelled in his absence; noting the while attentively the effect upon Nora of his cunning machinations. But she gave no sign of suspicion that