h in an impulse of flight.... The sudden movement
lifted his wife's lids, and she asked, in the incurious voice of the
woman whose life is enclosed in a magic circle of prosperity--"Any
news?"

"No--none--" he said, roused to a sense of immediate peril. The papers
lay scattered at his feet--what if she were to see them? He stretched
his arm to gather them up, but his next thought showed him the futility
of such concealment. The same advertisement would appear every day, for
weeks to come, in every newspaper; how could he prevent her seeing it?
He could not always be hiding the papers from her.... Well, and what if
she did see it? It would signify nothing to her, the chances were that
she would never even read the book.... As she ceased to be an element of
fear in his calculations the distance between them seemed to lessen
and he took her again, as it were, into the circle of his conjugal
protection.... Yet a moment before he had almost hated her!... He
laughed aloud at his senseless terrors.... He was off his balance,
decidedly.

"What are you laughing at?" she asked.

He explained, elaborately, that he was laughing at the recollection
of an old woman in the train, an old woman with a lot of bundles, who
couldn't find her ticket.... But somehow, in the telling, the humor of
the story seemed to evaporate, and he felt the conventionality of her
smile. He glanced at his watch, "Isn't it time to dress?"

She rose with serene reluctance. "It's a pity to go in. The garden looks
so lovely."

They lingered side by side, surveying their domain. There was not space
in it, at this hour, for the shadow of the elm-tree in the angle of the
hedge; it crossed the lawn, cut the flower-border in two, and ran up the
side of the house to the nursery window. She bent to flick a caterpillar
from the honey-suckle; then, as they turned indoors, "If we mean to
go on the yacht next Sunday," she suggested, "oughtn't you to let Mr.
Flamel know?"

Glennard's exasperation deflected suddenly. "Of course I shall let him
know. You always seem to imply that I'm going to do something rude to
Flamel."

The words reverberated through her silence; she had a way of thus
leaving one space in which to contemplate one's folly at arm's length.
Glennard turned on his heel and went upstairs. As he dropped into a
chair before his dressing-table he said to himself that in the last hour
he had sounded the depths of his humiliation and that the lowest dregs