or her. As he turned to
leave, Milly stopped him with a half question,--

"I didn't know Jack was visiting you."

The novelist hastened to reply:--

"You see he had promised to do another book for me, and came out to talk
it over. That was last Saturday."

"Oh!"

"He was not well then," he added, and then he went.

* * * * *

He never told her--she never knew--that he had run across Bragdon quite
by accident one day of awful heat, and stopped to exchange a few words
with an old friend he had not seen for some time. Bragdon had the limp
appearance of a man thoroughly done by the heat, and also to the
novelist's keen eye the mentally listless attitude of the man who has
been done by life before his time,--the look of one who knows he is not
"making good" in the fight. That was what had tortured the lip beneath
the mustache.

So on the spur of the moment he had suggested to the artist the new
book, though he knew that his publisher would demur. For his fame had
raised him altogether out of Bragdon's class. But it was the only
tangible way of putting out that helping hand the artist so obviously
needed just then. Bragdon had hesitated, as if he knew the motive
prompting the offer, then accepted, and the two had motored out of the
city together that evening. Even then the artist had a high fever....

* * * * *

That night Milly lived over like a vivid nightmare her married life down
to the least detail,--the time of golden hopes and aspirations, Paris
and Europe, her disillusionment, the futile scurry of their life in New
York, which she realized was a compromise without much result.... It
ended in a choke rather than a sob. There was so little left!

In the morning Reinhard reappeared with her brother-in-law. She
remembered little of what was done afterwards, in the usual, ordered
way, until after the brief service and the journey to the grave she was
left alone in their old home. She had wished to be alone. So Hazel
Fredericks took Virginia to the Reddons and left Milly for this night
and day to collect herself from her blow and decide with her
brother-in-law's help just what she should do.

VI

THE SECRET

The large "studio" room of the apartment had an unfamiliar air of
disorderliness about it. Bragdon's easel was there and his uncleaned
palette. Also a number of canvases were scattered about. These last
weeks, after he had left the