"You devil!" she said. "If she's dead, I'll see you hang for it."

But Elinor was not dead. Doctor Smalley, making rounds in a nearby
hospital and answering the emergency call, found her lying on her bed,
fully conscious and in great pain, while her husband bent over her in
seeming agony of mind. She had broken her leg. He sent Doyle out during
the setting. It was a principle of his to keep agonized husbands out of
the room.

CHAPTER XXXII

Life had beaten Lily Cardew. She went about the house, pathetically
reminiscent of Elinor Doyle in those days when she had sought sanctuary
there; but where Elinor had seen those days only as interludes in her
stormy life, Lily was finding a strange new peace. She was very tender,
very thoughtful, insistently cheerful, as though determined that her own
ill-fortune should not affect the rest of the household.

But to Lily this peace was not an interlude, but an end. Life for her
was over. Her bright dreams were gone, her future settled. Without so
putting it, even to herself, she dedicated herself to service, to small
kindnesses, and little thoughtful acts. She was, daily and hourly,
making reparation to them all for what she had cost them, in hope.

That was the thing that had gone out of life. Hope. Her loathing of
Louis Akers was gone. She did not hate him. Rather she felt toward him a
sort of numbed indifference. She wished never to see him again, but the
revolt that had followed her knowledge of the conditions under which he
had married her was gone. She tried to understand his viewpoint, to make
allowances for his lack of some fundamental creed to live by. But as the
days went on, with that healthy tendency of the mind to bury pain, she
found him, from a figure that bulked so large as to shut out all the
horizon of her life, receding more and more.

But always he would shut off certain things. Love, and marriage, and of
course the hope of happiness. Happiness was a thing one earned, and she
had not earned it.

After the scene at the Saint Elmo, when he had refused to let her go,
and when Willy Cameron had at last locked him in the bedroom of the
suite and had taken her away, there had followed a complete silence.
She had waited for some move or his part, perhaps an announcement of the
marriage in the newspapers, but nothing had appeared. He had commenced
a whirlwind campaign for the mayoralty and was receiving a substantial
support from labor.

The months at the