es that grow out of
a torpid, cunning, sensual life; apparently marked, too, by some strange
disease, the skin white, and hanging loose from the flesh. I pushed it
away. Jacqueline polished it with her palm.

"She was an opium-eater, you see? The eyes have that rigid staring,
like Death looking into life. You pushed it from you, Mrs.
Manning?"--shutting it. "Yet I know a man who cherished that living face
tenderly in his bosom for fifteen long years, and never opened his lips
to say to God once that it was hard to bear: faugh!" and she flung the
case into the water. "I only kept it to show you. She, the foul vampire,
sucked his youth away. I think it was but the husk of life that was left
him when she died;--and we are making that mean and poor enough,"--in a
lower voice. "Yet that man"--more firmly--"has a stronger brain and
fresher heart than you or I are fit to comprehend, Mrs. Manning. One
would think God meant that the last of his life, after that gone, should
be a warm Indian-summer day, opening broad and happily into the life He
is keeping for him,--would you not?"

"Who is the man?"--my lips growing cold.

"Your husband."

"I thought so. You did well to tell me that story."

She looked from me, her color coming and going.

"It was hard to do it. You are an older woman than I. But I thought it
was needed."

I looked up at the hard-set, chubby little face, beyond at the far
yellow night-line of sea, listened to the low choke, choke, of the water
in the wheels.

"I wish you would leave me. Let me be alone awhile."

She went to the other end of the deck, where she could keep me in sight.
It was so dull, that throb of the water, playing some old tune that
would not vary! The sea stretched out in such blank, featureless
reaches!

To nestle down into this man's heart and life! To make his last years
that warm Indian-summer day! I could do it! I! What utter rest there
were in that!

Yet was this power within me to rot and waste? My nature, all the habit
and teaching of the years gone, dragged me back, held up my Self before
me, bade me look at that. A whiff of tobacco-scented breathing made me
look up. M. Vaux was leaning on the deck-railing, his legs crossed,
surveying me critically through his half-shut eyes.

"Well, 'm, glad of the chance t' tell you. Henz and Doctor Howe thought
so well of that little thing of yours that we've put it in
rehearsal,--bring it out Monday week. 'N' 've concluded you can