a too sustained contemplation of nature by
the distractions of the restaurant and the gaming-table; but he had
carried her from one obscure corner of Europe to another, shunning
fashionable hotels and crowded watering-places, and displaying an
ingenuity in the discovery of the unvisited and the out-of-season that
gave their journey an odd resemblance to her melancholy wedding-tour.

She had never for a moment ceased to remember that the Dakota
divorce-court was the objective point of this later honeymoon, and her
allusions to the fact were as frequent as prudence permitted. Peter
seemed in no way disturbed by them. He responded with expressions of
increasing tenderness, or the purchase of another piece of jewelry;
and though Undine could not remember his ever voluntarily bringing the
subject of their marriage he did not shrink from her recurring mention
of it. He seemed merely too steeped in present well-being to think
of the future, and she ascribed this to the fact that his faculty of
enjoyment could not project itself beyond the moment. Her business was
to make each of their days so agreeable that when the last came he
should be conscious of a void to be bridged over as rapidly as possible
and when she thought this point had been reached she packed her trunks
and started for Dakota.

The next picture to follow was that of the dull months in the western
divorce-town, where, to escape loneliness and avoid comment, she had
cast in her lot with Mabel Lipscomb, who had lately arrived there on the
same errand.

Undine, at the outset, had been sorry for the friend whose new venture
seemed likely to result so much less brilliantly than her own; but
compassion had been replaced by irritation as Mabel's unpruned
vulgarities, her enormous encroaching satisfaction with herself and
her surroundings, began to pervade every corner of their provisional
household. Undine, during the first months of her exile, had been
sustained by the fullest confidence in her future. When she had parted
from Van Degen she had felt sure he meant to marry her, and the fact
that Mrs. Lipscomb was fortified by no similar hope made her easier to
bear with. Undine was almost ashamed that the unwooed Mabel should be
the witness of her own felicity, and planned to send her off on a trip
to Denver when Peter should announce his arrival; but the weeks passed,
and Peter did not come. Mabel, on the whole, behaved well in this
contingency. Undine, in her firs