without dropping a coin in it. He was altogether a
distressingly impracticable rich person, surrounded by people who
admired him for what he really was and by those who tried to squeeze
him for what he was worth!

It was a general wonder to people who knew him slightly why Bulstrode
had never married. The gentleman himself knew the answer perfectly,
but it amused him to discuss the question in spite of the pain, as well
as for the pleasure that it caused him to consider--_the reason why_.

Mary Falconer, the woman he loved, was the wife of a man of whom
Bulstrode could only think in pitiful contempt. But, thanks to an
element of chivalry in the character of the hero of this story the
years, as time went on, spread back of both the woman and the man in an
honorable series, of whose history neither one had any reason to be
ashamed.

Nevertheless, it struck them both as rather humorous, after all, that
of the three concerned her husband should be the only renegade and,
notwithstanding, profit by the combined good faith of his wife and the
man who loved her.

Oh, there was nothing easy in the task that Jimmy set for himself! And
it did not facilitate matters that Mary Falconer scarcely ever helped
him in the least! She was a beautiful woman, a tender woman, and there
were times when her friend felt that she cleverly and cruelly taunted
him with Puritanism and with his simple, old-fashioned ideas and
crystal clearness of vision, the _culte_ he had regarding marriage and
the sacred way in which he held bonds and vows. It was no help at all
to think she rebelled and jested at his reserve; that she did her best
to break it--and there were times when it was a brilliant siege. But
down in her heart she respected him, and as she saw around her the
domestic wrecks with which the matrimonial seas are encumbered, and
knew that her own craft promised to go safely through the storm, Mary
Falconer more than once had been grateful to the man.

As far as Bulstrode himself was concerned, each year--there had been
ten of them--he found the situation becoming more difficult and
dangerous. Not only did the future appear to him impossible as things
were, but he began to hate his arid past. He was sometimes led to ask,
what, after all, was he getting out of his colossal sacrifice? The
only reward he wanted was the woman herself, and, unless her husband
died, she would never be his. Bulstrode had not found that he could
solve th