ime.

His wife had left him within a year of his marriage, and whatever
investigations he may have privately made, they were sub rosa, and he
had persistently refused to make public ones. She would come back, he
believed, with an almost childish simplicity in the lure of his great
fortune,--if she needed money,--or him. That she should suffer real
poverty or hardship, lack the bare necessities of life, never for a
moment occurred to him. Why should she, when his whole fortune was at
her disposal--for her personal needs?

People who knew him a little said he had resented the slight to his
money more than the scandal to himself when Mrs. Masters disappeared.
They were in the wrong. Peter's pride had been very cruelly hurt: she
had not only scorned his gold, but spurned his affection, which was
quite genuine and deep so far as it went, but since he had never taken
the world into his confidence in the matter of his having any
affection to bestow, he as carefully kept his own counsel as to the
amount it had been hurt, and continued his life as if the coming and
going of Mrs. Masters was a matter of as little concern as the coming
or going of any other of the immortal souls and human bodies who got
caught in the toils of the great Machine.

As for the expected child, let her educate it after her own foolish,
pretty fancy. When it was of an age to understand matters, the man of
Power would slip in and claim his own, and he never doubted but that
the dazzle of his gold would outshine the vapid illusions of the
mother, and procure for him the homage of his offspring. Such was the
mingled simplicity and cuteness of the man that he never for one
moment allowed to himself there was any other possible reverse to this
picture, this, the only thought of revenge he harboured, its very
sting to be drawn by his own good-natured laugh at her "fancies." So
he worked on in keen enjoyment, and the dazzle of the gold grew
brighter as the years passed away unnoticed.

Peter Masters sat in the innermost sanctuary of the Temple of Mammon.
It was a big corner room with six windows facing south and east, with
low projecting balustrades outside which hid the street far down
below. The room had not a severely business-like aspect, it rather
suggested to the observer the word business was translatable into
other meanings than work. Thus the necessary carpet was more than a
carpet in that it was a work of Eastern art. The curtains were more
than