nd from this time on. Sit down, Blanche--I'm going to
put up the team, but to-morrow morning we go. We couldn't make it now,
anyway," he added. "There's nothing for it but to stay here all night."

Bailey stood aside to let him go out, then went to the stove and
mechanically stirred it up and put some water heating. This finished, he
sat down and leaned his head in his hands in confused thought.

To his clear sense his partner's act seemed monstrous. He had been
brought up to respect the marriage bond, and to protect and honor
women. The illicit was impossible to his candid soul. All the men he had
associated with had been respecters of marriage, though some of them
were obscene--thoughtlessly, he always believed--and now Jim, his chum,
had come between a man and his wife! With Estelle in his mind as the
type of purity, he could not understand how a wife could be the
faithless creature Blanche Burke seemed. Her weakness opened a new world
to him. He could not trust himself to speak to her.

The bubbling of the kettle aroused him, and he rose and went about
getting supper. After a few moments he felt able to ask, with formal
politeness:

"Won't you lay off your things, Mrs. Burke?"

She made no reply, but sat like an old gypsy, crouched low, with
brooding face. She, too, was wordless. She had made the curious mistake
of looking to Bailey for justification. She had felt that he would
understand and pity her, and his accusing eyes hurt her sorely. "If I
could only speak? If I could only find words to tell him my thought, he
would at least not despise me," she thought. Her face turned toward him
piteously, but she dared not lift her eyes to his. He typified the world
to her, and, furthermore, he was kindly and just; and yet he was about
to condemn her because she could not make him understand.

Trained to laugh when she should weep, how could she plead overmastering
desire, the pressure of loneliness and poverty, and, last of all, the
power of a man who stood, in her fancy, among the most brilliant of her
world. She felt herself in the grasp of forces as vast, as impersonal,
and as illimitable as the wind and the sky, but, reduced to words, her
poor plea for mercy would have been, "I could not help it."

Her maternity, which should have been her glory and her pride, was at
this hour an insupportable shame. She had experienced her moments of
emotional exaltation wherein she was lifted above self-abasement, but
now she