r gloves, he fumbled among the
knick-knacks on the mantel-piece for a match to light his cigarette.

"Well, good-by," she said, turning to go; and from the threshold she
added: "By the way, I've sorted the papers you gave me. Those that
I thought you would like to keep are on your study-table." She went
downstairs and he heard the door close behind her.

She had sorted the papers--she knew, then--she MUST know--and she had
made no sign!

Glennard, he hardly knew how, found himself once more in the study. On
the table lay the packet he had given her. It was much smaller--she had
evidently gone over the papers with care, destroying the greater number.
He loosened the elastic band and spread the remaining envelopes on his
desk. The publisher's notice was among them.

X

His wife knew and she made no sign. Glennard found himself in the case
of the seafarer who, closing his eyes at nightfall on a scene he thinks
to put leagues behind him before day, wakes to a port-hole framing the
same patch of shore. From the kind of exaltation to which his resolve
had lifted him he dropped to an unreasoning apathy. His impulse of
confession had acted as a drug to self-reproach. He had tried to shift
a portion of his burden to his wife's shoulders and now that she had
tacitly refused to carry it, he felt the load too heavy to be taken up
again.

A fortunate interval of hard work brought respite from this phase of
sterile misery. He went West to argue an important case, won it, and
came back to fresh preoccupations. His own affairs were thriving enough
to engross him in the pauses of his professional work, and for over
two months he had little time to look himself in the face. Not
unnaturally--for he was as yet unskilled in the subtleties of
introspection--he mistook his temporary insensibility for a gradual
revival of moral health.

He told himself that he was recovering his sense of proportion, getting
to see things in their true light; and if he now thought of his rash
appeal to his wife's sympathy it was as an act of folly from the
consequences of which he had been saved by the providence that watches
over madmen. He had little leisure to observe Alexa; but he concluded
that the common-sense momentarily denied him had counselled her
uncritical acceptance of the inevitable. If such a quality was a
poor substitute for the passionate justness that had once seemed to
characterize her, he accepted the alternative as a part o