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She herself had written pages and pages of prose, and had filled an old copy-book with incoherent little poems of which Keble knew nothing. They sang of winds sweeping through canyons and across sage plains, of snowy forests and frozen rivers; they uttered vague lament, unrest, exultation. Through them surged yearnings and confessions that abashed her. She kept them as mementoes of youthful rebellion, shut them up in a corner of the old box that had conveyed her meagre marriage equipment hither from her father’s tiny house in the Valley, and then watched Keble’s eyes and lips, listened to his spun-silver sentences in the hope of acquiring clues to—she scarcely knew what.

Keble had come to the second lighting of a thoughtful pipe before the silence was broken. He looked for some moments in her direction before saying, “What sort of tea-cozy thing are you making now, dear?”

Tea-cozy thing! It was a bureau scarf,—a beautiful, beautiful one! For the birthday of Aunt Denise Mornay-Mareuil in Quebec. And Louise sacrilegiously crossed herself.