is hands in
his pockets, was watching her from the other side of the room. She
twisted the piece of paper in her hands. She had always a bald way of
telling herself the truth. Now she would face Dick in the same spirit.
After all, she was his wife. He couldn't get away from that.

"Well," she said, "I suppose you don't love me any more?" Her voice was
like her mother's, acid and selfish.

"Do you love me?" asked Dick.

"No!" said Lena. She saw him writhe and felt glad that she had the power
to hurt him, but he answered very gently.

"Then I still have the advantage of you, Lena. I love you, not in the
old way I once dreamed of loving--but still I love you. All this that
I've said to-night was not spoken in the heat of anger. I've known these
facts for a long time, and you have never felt any change in my manner;
but gradually I have come to see that there could never be any genuine
relations between us--you and me--so long as you thought me just a silly
dupe for you to get everything you could from, to be played on as you
pleased. We must begin again, a new way. You don't love me, you say. I
do love you, sweetheart, not for what I thought you were, but for what
you are, because you are my wife, because you need my tenderness and
help. But I'm not going to let you lead any longer. We can't even walk
side by side as some husbands and wives do." Dick seemed to hear the
voices of Ellery and Madeline by their own fireside, and he went on
hurriedly. "You needn't look at me that way, Lena, as if you were
afraid of me. I shall want you to be comfortable and happy. I shall try
to give you the things you want--things--things--things! But I have some
purposes in life, and they, not you, are to be my master-spirits."

Dick turned away and stared out of the winter window, stirred by his own
words into a strange new understanding of himself--a mere fatuous
self-believer, a man who trusted to fate not fight, to fortune not to
mastery, who had not made his standards, but let them make themselves.
And now it was come to this, that a half-hour in a room with a foolish
girl was the turning-point in his life.

He seemed strange to himself, as though he were examining a life from
the outside rather than from the inside, and fumbling at its real
meaning.

He had done no wrong; but what does the march of events care whether the
failure be intentional or careless? Results follow just the same.

There flashed before his inward eye the