Angela Hilary was half crying, half laughing, when she danced into the drawing-room. The tea still stood on the low table, steam still hissed from the kettle. But only Latham was there, alone, on the hearthrug. She swept him a low curtsey, caught him by the shoulders and swung him into the center of the room, whistling a ravishing melody in three-four time. He put his arm about her gravely, and they waltzed on and on until Barker cried, “Oh lor!” in the doorway.

“It’s all right,” Angela told her. “It’s callisthenics. Dr. Latham R-Xed for my health. I’ve a touch of gout, Barker.” But Barker had fled giggling.

“You’ve more than a touch of the devil,” the physician corrected her severely. Angela giggled too at that, a sweeter, more seductive giggle than Barker’s.

“Mein kleiner Herr Doktor!” she began sweetly. They were still standing where they had been when Barker arrested their waltzing. Latham caught her and shook her. “Bitte erlauben Sie! ich bin nicht eine Ihrer armen Kranken und verbitte mir Auftreten. Jetzt sind Sie erzÜrnt, Über nichts, wahrhaftig nichts. Ach! die MÄnner, wie sind Sie dumm!” She poured out at him. It irritated the Englishman to be chattered to in intimate German, and Angela Hilary delighted in doing it. She had done it to him many times more than once, and the more he squirmed the more eloquent, the swifter grew her German. She had spoken to him in the hated language all through an otherwise dull dinner-party, a dour Bishop on her other side, an indignant and very bony suffragette just across the table. She had done it at Church Parade, and at Harrods (she had dragged him out shopping twice), in the Abbey and in the packed stalls of the Garrick.

“Hush, or I’ll make you,” he warned her now. He intended her to say, “How?” And she knew it and smiled. But she said nothing of the sort—but, almost gravely, “Oh! but I’m happy!”

“You look it.”

“So happy. So glad.”

“It suits you,” he said. “Do you know, I rather intend to try it myself.”

“It?”

“Happiness.”

Angela flushed. “Shall we dance some more?” she said quickly.

Latham picked her up and put her into a chair. “Barker’s face was enough. I prefer to avoid Mrs. Leavitt’s.”

Mrs. Hilary looked up at him wickedly. “Please, must I stay-put?”

“Must you what?”

“Insular Englishman, ‘stay-put’ is graphic American. By the way, why do you dislike Americans so?”

“I should like you even better as a British subject,” he admitted.

Angela Hilary turned to the fire and spoke into it. “Oh, this war—this wretched war! But, do you know, Dr. Latham,” swinging back to him—she could not keep turned from him long—“do you know, I’ve been thinking.” Latham smiled indulgently. “Oh! I think a great deal, a very great deal.”

“When?”

“Well—for one thing—I think most all night—every night.”

He let the enormity pass. “And this last cogitation, of which you were about to speak——”

“When you interrupted me rudely.”

“When I interrupted you with flaming interest. It was about our present war, I apprehend.”

“I was thinking what a lot of good people were getting out of it—different people such different good. I don’t suppose there’s any one who hasn’t reaped some real benefit from it, if they’d stop and think.”

Horace Latham shook his head slowly. “I wonder.”

“Oh, I don’t; I’m sure.”

He studied the fire flames gravely for a time. Then he sighed, shook off the mood her words had called forth, and turned to her lightly.

“And what benefit has Mrs. Hilary reaped from the war?”

She knitted her brows, and sat very still. Suddenly her face kindled and her lips quivered mutinously.

“I know. I’ve learned how to spell sugar.”

Latham laughed. This woman who spoke three other tongues as fluently and probably as erratically as she did English, and whose music was such as few amateurs and not all professionals could approach, was an atrocious speller, and every one knew it who had ever been favored with a letter from her. Latham had been favored with many. He had waste-paper-basketed them at first—but of late he did not.

“I can!!” she insisted. “S-U-G-A-R. There! Sugar, color, collar, their, reign, oh! what I’ve suffered over those words! I spent a whole day once at school hunting for ‘sword’ in the dictionary (I do think of all the silly books dictionaries are the silliest), and then I never found it. Think of shoving a w into sword. Who wants it? I don’t. Nobody needs it. Silly language.”

“Which language can your high wisdomship spell the least incorrectly?” he asked pleasantly.

“Mein werter Herr Doktor, das Buchstabiren ist mir Nebensache. Ich sprache vier Sprachen flissend—Sie kaum im Stande sind nur eine zu stammeln doch glauben Sie dass eine Frau ohne Fehler sei wenn sie richtig Englisch schreibt und nur an die drei k’s denkt—wir man in Deutschland zu sagen pflegt—Kirche, Kinder und KÜche,” she said in a torrent.

“You are ill,” he said, “I am going to prescribe for you.”

“What?” She made a wry face. “What?”

“This,” he gathered her into his arms and kissed her swiftly—and then again—more than once.

At last she pushed him away. “It took some doing,” she told herself in the glass that night. But to him she said gravely, “To be taken only three times a day—after meals.”

“No fear!” Her physician cried, “To be taken again and again!” And it was.

The chatterbox was silent and shy. But Horace Latham had a great deal to tell her. He had only begun to say it, haltingly at first, then swifter and swifter, man dominating and wooing his woman, when Angela cried imploringly, “Hush!”

He thought that she heard some one coming. But it was not that. Angela Hilary was planning her wedding-dress. He hushed at her cry, and sat studying her face. Presently she fell to knotting and unknotting his long fingers.

“Silk has most distinction,” she said to the fire, “and satin has its points. Oh, yes, satin has points, but I think velvet, yes—velvet and white fox.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded her lover.

Angela giggled.