"Please do as you're told.

I'm keeping my arm around you for the present." Always in the past she had obeyed, when commanded by her mother or husband, with an apathy which had smothered her youth.

Now her youth seemed to drink eagerly a cup of obedience--as though it were the wine of life itself.

She even longed to obey the voice whispering in her soul from ever so far away: "Close--close to him! Home is in his arms." With all her unconscious revelation of herself, however, there was that in her which was pure maidenliness.

For, married as she was, she had never in any real sense been a wife, or truly understood what wifedom meant, or heard in her heart the call of the cradle.