d in dismissal and settled himself to sleep. When
Culver began to stammer thanks for the promised promotion, he frowned.

"Don't bother me with that sort of stuff. The job's yours because
you've earned it. It'll be yours as long as you can hold it down--or
until you earn a better one. And you'll be loyal as Giddings was--just
as long as it's to your interest and not a second longer. Otherwise
you'd be a fool, and I'd not have you about me. Be off!"

He slept an hour and a half, then Pauline brought him a cup of beef
extract--"A very small cup," he grumbled good-humoredly. "And a very
weak, watery mess in it."

As he lay propped in his bed drinking it--slowly to make it last the
longer--Pauline sat looking at him. His hands had been fat and puffy;
she was filled with pity as she watched the almost scrawny hand holding
the cup to his lips; there were hollows between the tendons, and the
wrist was gaunt. Her gaze wandered to his face and rested there, in
sympathy and tenderness. The ravages of the fever had been
frightful--hollows where the swollen, sensual cheeks had been; the neck
caved in behind and under the jaw-bones; loose skin hanging in wattles,
deeply-set eyes, a pinched look about the nostrils and the corners of
the mouth. He was homely, ugly even; except the noble curve of head
and profile, not a trace of his former good looks--but at least that
swinish, fleshy, fleshly expression was gone.

A physical wreck, battered, torn, dismantled by the storm and fire of
disease! It was hard for her to keep back her tears.

Their eyes met and his instantly shifted. The rest of the world saw
the man of force bent upon the possessions which mean fame and honor
regardless of how they are got. He knew that he could deceive the
world, that so long as he was rich and powerful it would refuse to let
him undeceive it, though he might strive to show it what he was. But
he knew that SHE saw him as he really was--knew him as only a husband
and a wife can know each the other. And he respected her for the
qualities which gave her a right to despise him, and which had forced
her to exercise that right. He felt himself the superior of the rest
of his fellow-beings, but her inferior; did she not successfully defy
him; could she not, without a word, by simply resting her calm gaze
upon him, make him shift and slink?

He felt that he must change the subject--not of their conversation, for
they were not talking, but of t