ldness at a party where they had met, and
her husband had taken her to task for it when they got home.

Entirely wrapped up in himself as he was, it had never occurred to him
that his wife could have any cause of complaint against him, and what
she had been going through had been altogether lost upon him. She did
not say much now in reply to his reproaches--she merely stood and looked
at him in a way that made him feel rather uncomfortable, and then
quietly left the room. He could hear her going with slow steps up the
stairs.

An hour or so after, she came down again into the room with a light in
her hand. Her expression was cold, and she did not look at him as she
set about putting the room to rights for the night as usual. He tried to
pacify her, begged her not to take what he had said so much to heart,
and was going to put his arm affectionately round her waist, but was
stopped on finding himself suddenly confronted by the deadly pale face
and flashing eyes of an infuriated woman.

The time had come to speak out, and she did speak out; and Lieutenant
Beck heard what he would have been very sorry to repeat to his best
friend. For he felt in his heart that it was nothing but the truth,
however soon he might forget it again.

She called him a pitiful wretch, who would sell her and everything they
jointly prized to the first comer for a little miserable flattery. He
had distributed himself to that extent among his giddy acquaintance, she
went on, with a movement as if she thrust from her something she utterly
despised, that there was nothing left of him for a woman with a vestige
of truth or honour to pick up.

When her husband threw himself upon the sofa, and exclaimed in a
sentimental tone that he was a miserable man, she repeated the last word
twice in an inexpressibly contemptuous tone--

"A man!--a man!--if you had been a man, you would still have had my
love--at all events a remnant of it; but now, like this light
here,"--and she puffed it out,--"all is extinguished between us."

With that she left the room.

Beck sat where he was, overwhelmed and stupefied at this sudden blow
which had fallen upon his domestic happiness, and with a horrible
apprehension that she might have meant what she said in real earnest.

She sat in the room with her child the whole night, and he knew that he
dared not disturb her.

Notwithstanding the struggle which it cost his pride, he was almost
humble in his manner towards he