ce, which gave her a touching
reasonableness, made Glennard's situation more difficult than if he had
aspired to a princess bred in the purple. Between them they asked
so little--they knew so well how to make that little do--but they
understood also, and she especially did not for a moment let him forget,
that without that little the future they dreamed of was impossible.

The sight of her photograph quickened Glennard's exasperation. He was
sick and ashamed of the part he was playing. He had loved her now for
two years, with the tranquil tenderness that gathers depth and volume
as it nears fulfilment; he knew that she would wait for him--but the
certitude was an added pang. There are times when the constancy of the
woman one cannot marry is almost as trying as that of the woman one does
not want to.

Glennard turned up his reading-lamp and stirred the fire. He had a long
evening before him and he wanted to crowd out thought with action. He
had brought some papers from his office and he spread them out on his
table and squared himself to the task....

It must have been an hour later that he found himself automatically
fitting a key into a locked drawer. He had no more notion than a
somnambulist of the mental process that had led up to this action. He
was just dimly aware of having pushed aside the papers and the heavy
calf volumes that a moment before had bounded his horizon, and of laying
in their place, without a trace of conscious volition, the parcel he had
taken from the drawer.

The letters were tied in packets of thirty or forty. There were a great
many packets. On some of the envelopes the ink was fading; on others,
which bore the English post-mark, it was still fresh. She had been dead
hardly three years, and she had written, at lengthening intervals, to
the last....

He undid one of the earlier packets--little notes written during their
first acquaintance at Hillbridge. Glennard, on leaving college, had
begun life in his uncle's law office in the old university town. It was
there that, at the house of her father, Professor Forth, he had first
met the young lady then chiefly distinguished for having, after two
years of a conspicuously unhappy marriage, returned to the protection of
the paternal roof.

Mrs. Aubyn was at that time an eager and somewhat tragic young woman,
of complex mind and undeveloped manners, whom her crude experience of
matrimony had fitted out with a stock of generalizations that expl