d went out with a perfect nonchalance and
good-temper.

* * * * *

Kitty was to have gone to a ball. She countermanded her maid's
preparations, and sent the maid to bed. In due time all the servants
went to bed, the front door being left on the latch as usual for Ashe's
late return. About midnight a little figure slipped into the child's
nursery. The nurse was fast asleep. Kitty sat beside the child,
motionless, for an hour, and when Ashe let himself into the house about
two o'clock he heard a little rustle in the hall, and there stood Kitty,
waiting for him.

"Kitty, what are you about?" he said, in pretended amazement. But in
reality he was not astonished at all. His life for months past had been
pitched in a key of extravagance and tumult. He had been practically
certain that he should find Kitty in the hall.

With great tenderness he half led, half carried her up-stairs. She clung
to him as passionately as, before dinner, she had repulsed him. When
they reached their room, the tired man, dropping with sleep, after a
Parliamentary wrestle in which every faculty had been taxed to the
utmost, took his wife in his arms; and there Kitty sobbed and talked
herself into a peace of complete exhaustion. In this state she was one
of the most exquisite of human beings, with words, tone, and gestures of
a heavenly softness and languor. The evil spirit went out of her, and
she was all ethereal tenderness, sadness, and remorse. For more than two
years, scenes like this had, in Ashe's case, melted into final delight
and intoxication which more than effaced the memory of what had gone
before. Now for several months he had dreaded the issue of the crisis,
no less than the crisis itself. It left him unnerved as though some
morbid sirocco had passed over him.

When Kitty at last had fallen asleep, Ashe stood for some time beside
his dressing-room window, looking absently into the cloudy night, too
tired even to undress. A gusty northwest wind tore down the street and
beat against the windows. The unrest without increased the tension of
his mind and body. Like Lady Tranmore, he had, as it were, stepped back
from his life, and was looking at it--the last three years of it in
particular--as a whole. What was the net result of those years? Where
was he? Whither were he and Kitty going? A strange pang shot through
him. The mere asking of the question had been as the lifting of the lamp
of Psyche.

The