equences. It would be at least a year, the papers said,
before she could resume her career on the stage. He searched the
columns daily for his own name, always expecting to see himself in
type little less conspicuous than that accorded to her, and
stigmatised as a brute, an inebriate, a loafer. It was all the same to
him--brute, soak, or loafer. But even under these extraordinary
conditions he was as completely blanketed by obscurity as if he never
had been in existence.

Sometimes he wondered whether she could get a divorce without
according him a name. He had read of fellow creatures meeting death
"at the hand of a person (or of persons) unknown." Could a divorce
complaint be worded in such non-committal terms? Then there was that
time-honoured shroud of private identity, the multitudinous John Doe.
Could she have the heart to bring proceedings against him as John Doe?
He wondered.

If he were to shoot himself, so that she might have her freedom
without going to all the trouble of a divorce or the annoyance of a
term of residence in Reno, would she put his name on a tombstone? He
wondered.

A strange, a most unusual thing happened to him just before he left
the house to go to the depot. He was never quite able to account for
the impulse which sent him upstairs rather obliquely to search through
a trunk for a revolver, purchased a couple of years before, following
the report that housebreakers were abroad in Tarrytown, and which he
had promptly locked away in his trunk for fear that Phoebe might get
hold of it.

He rummaged about in the trunk, finally unearthing the weapon. He
slipped it into his overcoat pocket with a furtive glance over his
shoulder. He chuckled as he went down the stairs. It was a funny thing
for him to do, locking the revolver in the trunk that way. What
burglar so obliging as to tarry while he went through all the
preliminaries incident to destruction under the circumstances? Yes, it
was stupid of him.

He did not consider the prospect of being arrested for carrying
concealed weapons until he was halfway to the city, and then he broke
into a mild perspiration. From that moment he eyed every man with
suspicion. He had heard of "plain clothes men." They were the very
worst kind. "They take you unawares so," said he to himself, with
which he moved closer to the wall of the car, the more effectually to
conceal the weapon. It wouldn't do to be caught going about with a
revolver in one's pocket.