re she stood with the look on her face he had pictured to
himself many a time when he had thought of her as his wife. It was a look
of love unutterable, bewildering, alluring, compelling. It was so he had
thought she would meet him when he came home to her from his daily
business cares. And now she was there, looking that way, and he stood
here, so near her, and yet a great gulf fixed! It was heaven and hell met
together, and he had no power to change either.

He did not come over to her and bow low to kiss the white hand as Harry
had done,--as she had thought she could compel him to do. He only stood and
looked at her with the pain of an anguish beyond her comprehension, until
the look would have burned through to her heart--if she had had a heart.

"You are in trouble," he spoke hoarsely, as if murmuring an excuse for
having come.

She melted at once into the loveliest sorrow, her mobile features taking
on a wan cast only enlivened by the glow of her cheeks.

"Sit down," she said, "you were so good to come to me, and so soon--" and
her voice was like lily-bells in a quiet church-yard among the
head-stones. She placed him a chair.

"Yes, I am in trouble. But that is a slight thing compared to my
unhappiness. I think I am the most miserable creature that breathes upon
this earth."

And with that she dropped into a low chair and hid her glowing face in a
dainty, lace bordered kerchief that suppressed a well-timed sob.

Kate had wisely calculated how she could reach David's heart. If she had
looked up then and seen his white, drawn look, and the tense grasp of his
hands that only the greatest self-control kept quiet on his knee, perhaps
even her mercilessness would have been softened. But she did not look, and
she felt her part was well taken. She sobbed quietly, and waited, and his
hoarse voice asked once more, as gently as a woman's through his pain:

"Will you tell me what it is and how I can help you?" He longed to take
her in his arms like a little child and comfort her, but he might not. She
was another's. And perhaps that other had been cruel to her! His clenched
fists showed how terrible was the thought. But still the bowed figure in
its piteous black sobbed and did not reply anything except, "Oh, I am so
unhappy! I cannot bear it any longer."

"Is--your--your--husband unkind to you?" The words tore themselves from his
tense lips as though they were beyond his control.

"Oh, no,--not exactly unkind--that