a
safe haven for Phoebe. The inference was plain. She wanted to get rid
of him in order to marry Fairfax. Fairfax had been honest enough to
confess that he was acting on his own initiative in proposing the
bribe, but there must have been something behind it all.

He had spoken of "charges." What charge could Nellie bring against
him? He was two days in arriving at the only one--failure to provide.
Yes, that was it. "Failure to provide." How he hated the words. How he
despised men who did not provide for their wives. He had never thought
of himself in that light before. But it was true, all true. And Nellie
was slipping away from him as the result. Not only Nellie but Phoebe.
She would be taken from him.

"I don't drink," he argued with himself, "and I've never treated her
cruelly. Other women don't interest me. I never swear at her. I've
never beaten her. I've always loved her. So it must be that I'm 'no
good,' just as that scoundrel says. 'No good!' Why, she knows better
than that. There never was a fellow who worked harder than I did for
Mr. Davis. I drew trade to his store. Anybody in Blakeville will swear
to that. Haven't I tried my best to get a job in the same shows with
her? Wasn't I the best comedian they had in the dramatic club? I've
never had the chance to show what I could do, and Nellie knows it. But
I'll show them all! I'll make that big brute wish he'd never been
born. I'll--I'll assert myself. He shan't take her away from me."

His resolutions soared to great heights, only to succumb to chilly
blasts that sent them shrivelled back to the lowest depths. What could
he do against a man who had all the money that Fairfax possessed? What
could he offer for Nellie, now that some one else had put a stupendous
price on her? He remembered reading about an oil painting that
originally sold for five hundred francs and afterward brought forty
thousand dollars. Somehow he likened Nellie to a picture, with the
reservation that he didn't believe any painting on earth was worth
forty thousand dollars. If there was such a thing, he had never seen
it.

Then he began to think of poor Nellie cast helpless among the
tempters. She was like a child among voracious beasts of prey. No
wonder she felt hard toward him! He was to blame, terribly to blame.
In the highest, most exalted state of remorse he wept, not once but
often. His poor little Nellie!

In one of these strange ever-growing flights of combined self-reproach