bar the rising tide with a pint sieve. At such times,
it seemed to her that Lorimer deliberately made up his mind to have a
revel, that he set himself to work to carry out his desires to a
satisfactory conclusion. These periods came at irregular intervals; but,
all in all, the intervals were shortening and the revels were
increasing. Beatrix learned their symptoms far too quickly; she learned
to know the depression and irritability which greeted her every effort
to rouse and to please him. It was at such times that Lorimer made
bitter revolt against what he termed her narrowness and prejudice, or
burst into occasional angry petulance, if she tried to urge him to cut
loose from the club and from the constantly-growing influence of Lloyd
Avalons who was discerning enough to discover that Lorimers appetite was
a possible lever by which he himself might pry himself up into a more
stable position in society. In this matter, however, Lloyd Avalons was
not quite so unprincipled as he seemed. To his mind, there was nothing
so very bad about a little matter of social intoxication. The evil of
drink was an affair bounded by purely geographical lines, and he
encouraged in Lorimer the very thing for which he would have been prompt
to dismiss the man who cleaned the snow off his sidewalk.

Afterwards, when the depression had ended in the revel, when they both
had ended in penitence, Lorimer temporarily came back again to the old
ways. The caressing intonations returned to his voice, as he talked to
Beatrix; his eyes followed her with loving pride, as she moved about the
room; for days at a time he devoted himself to her wishes, serving her
with a tireless chivalry which made her long to forget all that had gone
before. However, Beatrix could not forget certain facts; certain
episodes were so fixed in her memory that they seemed branded upon the
very tissue of her life. In some respects, these intervening days were
the hardest ones she had to bear. Lorimer seemed totally unable to grasp
the fact that any permanent barrier was rising between them, that there
was any real reason why they should not meet on precisely the old
ground. To his mind, half an hour of impulsive penitence could wipe out
half a night of deliberate sin, and Beatrix dared not explain to him
that it was otherwise. Her hold over him, that hold which once she had
deemed so strong, was growing slighter with every passing month. Any
hasty or ill-considered word from her