garden: the dryest shares blossomed into dividends, and a golden harvest
awaited his sickle.

He glanced at his wife with the tranquil air of the man who digests
good luck as naturally as the dry ground absorbs a shower. "Things are
looking uncommonly well. I believe we shall be able to go to town for
two or three months next winter if we can find something cheap."

She smiled luxuriously: it was pleasant to be able to say, with an air
of balancing relative advantages, "Really, on the baby's account I shall
be almost sorry; but if we do go, there's Kate Erskine's house... she'll
let us have it for almost nothing...."

"Well, write her about it," he recommended, his eyes travelling on
in search of the weather report. He had turned to the wrong page; and
suddenly a line of black characters leapt out at him as from an ambush.

"'Margaret Aubyn's Letters.' Two volumes. Out to-day. First edition of
five thousand sold out before leaving the press. Second edition ready
next week. THE BOOK OF THE YEAR...."

He looked up stupidly. His wife still sat with her head thrown back,
her pure profile detached against the cushions. She was smiling a little
over the prospect his last words had opened. Behind her head shivers
of sun and shade ran across the striped awning. A row of maples and
a privet hedge hid their neighbor's gables, giving them undivided
possession of their leafy half-acre; and life, a moment before, had
been like their plot of ground, shut off, hedged in from importunities,
impenetrably his and hers. Now it seemed to him that every maple-leaf,
every privet-bud, was a relentless human gaze, pressing close upon their
privacy. It was as though they sat in a brightly lit room, uncurtained
from a darkness full of hostile watchers.... His wife still smiled; and
her unconsciousness of danger seemed, in some horrible way, to put her
beyond the reach of rescue....

He had not known that it would be like this. After the first odious
weeks, spent in preparing the letters for publication, in submitting
them to Flamel, and in negotiating with the publishers, the transaction
had dropped out of his consciousness into that unvisited limbo to which
we relegate the deeds we would rather not have done but have no notion
of undoing. From the moment he had obtained Miss Trent's promise not
to sail with her aunt he had tried to imagine himself irrevocably
committed. After that, he argued, his first duty was to her--she had
become his