er sidewise at her, smiled with an equal
mixture of real liking and settled abhorrence.

For a good many years these two had been--not friends: she was
incapable of so true a passion; he was too capable to misapply it
so unerringly. Their association had assumed the character of one
of those belated intimacies, which sometimes spring up in the lives
of aged men and women when each wants companionship but has been
left companionless.

Time was when he could not have believed that any tie whatsoever
would ever exist between them. Her first husband had been his
first law partner; and from what he had been forced to observe
concerning his partner's fireside wretchedness during his few years
of married life, he had learned to fear and to hate her. With his
quick temper and honest way he made no pretence of hiding his
feeling--declined her invitations--cut her openly in society--and
said why. When his partner died, not killed indeed but
broken-spirited, he spoke his mind on the subject more publicly and
plainly still.

She brewed the poison of revenge and waited.

A year or two later when his engagement was announced her opportunity
came. In a single day it was done--so quietly, so perfectly, that
no one knew by whom. Scandal was set running--Scandal, which no
pursuing messengers of truth and justice can ever overtake and drag
backward along its path. His engagement was broken; she whom he was
to wed in time married one of his friends; and for years his own life
all but went to pieces.

Time is naught, existence a span. One evening when she was old
Mrs. Conyers, and he old Judge Morris, she sixty and he sixty-five,
they met at an evening party. In all those years he had never
spoken to her, nurturing his original dislike and rather suspecting
that it was she who had so ruined him. But on this night there had
been a great supper and with him a great supper was a great
weakness: there had been wine, and wine was not a weakness at all,
but a glass merely made him more than happy, more than kind. Soon
after supper therefore he was strolling through the emptied rooms
in a rather lonesome way, his face like a red moon in a fog,
beseeching only that it might shed its rays impartially on any
approachable darkness.

Men with wives and children can well afford to turn hard cold faces
to the outside world: the warmth and tenderness of which they are
capable they can exercise within their own restricted enclosures.
N