wildered feeling, and looked again to be sure that he had
seen aright. Her ghastly pallor she concealed in a manner which she
thought distinctly sinful. She painted and powdered. She did not
dare purchase openly the concoctions which were used for improving
her complexion, but she went to a manicure and invested in a colored
salve for her finger-nails. This, with rather surprising skill for
such a conscience-pricked tyro, she applied to the pale curves of
her cheeks and her blue lips. She took more pains than ever before
with her dress, and it was all to deceive her husband, that he
should not be annoyed. She felt a desperate shame because of her
illness; she felt it to be a direct personal injury to this
masculine power which had been set over her gentle femininity. It
was not so much because she was afraid of losing his affection that
she concealed her affliction from him, as because she felt that the
affliction itself was somehow an act of disloyalty. Her terrible
malady had in a way affected her reasoning powers, so that they had
become distorted by a monstrous growth of suffering, like her body.
She would not give up going about as usual, and was never absent
from church. She drove about with her husband in his smart trap.
Twice she had gone with Robert to consult the New York specialist,
taking times when Norman was away on business. She still would not
consent to an operation, and lately the specialist had been lukewarm
in advising it. He had indeed been doubtful from the first.

Mrs. Lloyd treated Robert with a soft affection which was almost
like that of a mother. One night, when he returned late from a call
on Ellen, she sat up waiting for him. He had not called on Ellen
before for several months, and it was nearly midnight when he
returned.

"Why, Aunt Lizzie, are you up?" he cried, as he entered the library
door and saw his aunt's figure, clad in shining black satin,
gleaming with jet, in the depths of an easy-chair.

Mrs. Lloyd looked up at him with an expression of patient suffering.
"I couldn't go to sleep if I went to bed, Robert," she replied, in a
hushed voice. She found it a comfort sometimes to confess her pain
to him. Robert went over to her, and drew her large, crinkled, blond
head to his shoulder as if she had been a child.

"Poor thing," he whispered, stroking her face pitifully. "Is it very
terrible?" he asked, with his lips close to her ear.

"Terrible," she whispered back. "Oh, Robert, y