"Yes, I am." The sound of laughter came from the drawing room. "Yes, I am, and I must go in there to be pleased. Howard, do you believe that anything could separate us?"
"Really, you are beginning to distress me. I have never known what it was to live without you, and I couldn't know it. But cheer up, won't you? To-morrow we—"
"Yes, I will," she broke in. "It was only a shadow and it has passed. But I wonder where such shadows come from. Why do they come? Who has the ordering of them?"
As they were walking toward the door opening into the hall, William entered from the passage, smoking his pipe, his thin hair rumpled as if he had just emerged from a contest. Howard and Florence did not see him, and he called to them.
"I say, there, Howard, I thought you were going out."
The young man halted and looked back with a smile. "Don't you see me going out, Uncle Billy?"
"Now look here, young fellow!" exclaimed the old man in a rage, his hair seeming to stand up straighter, "I don't want to be Uncle Billied by you, and I won't have it, either. Your daddy's got it in for me lately, and I'll be hanged if I'm going to put up with it much longer. And Florence, you'd better speak to him about it. I want to give him every opportunity to mend his ways toward me, and you'd better caution him before it's too late. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Uncle William," she answered. "And I will speak to him."
"Well, see that you do. And, mind you, I wasn't certain whether it was on the tenth or the eleventh; I was willing to give either the benefit of the doubt; I—"
"That's all right, Uncle William," said Howard.