He turned off the lights, and as he crossed the house, pressed off the hall lights as he went, while the many unimportant little nothings, almost of themselves, ranged themselves into an ordered text of doubt and conjecture that he could not refrain from reading.

On his sleeping porch, glancing at his barometers and thermometers, her laughing face in the round frame caught his eyes, and, standing before it, even bending closer to it, he studied her long.

“Oh, well,” he muttered, as he drew up the bedcovers, propped the pillows behind him and reached for a stack of proofsheets, “whatever it is I’ll have to play it.”

He looked sidewise at her picture.

“But, oh, Little Woman, I wish you wouldn’t,” was the sighed good night.