weak and dizzy from nervous tension, feeling as if she were
about to faint, met her on the threshold.

"Kenneth!" she gasped. "Is he all right?"

"Certainly--he's fine. He's a little tired and nervous after the long
journey, and the blue spectacles he wears make him look different, but
he's all right."

The wife looked searchingly, eagerly at the young girl's face, as if
seeking to read there what she dreaded to ask, and it seemed to her
that the customary ring of sincerity was lacking in her sister's voice.

"Where is he--why isn't he with you?'

"Here he is now--don't you see him?"

Helen looked out. There came the tall, familiar figure she knew so
well, the square shoulders, the thick bushy hair, with its single white
lock so strangely isolated among the brown. Her heart fell as she saw
the blue glasses. They veiled from her view those dear blue eyes, so
kind and true. They made him look different. But what did she care as
long as he had come home to her? Even with the horrid glasses, that
dear form she would know in a thousand!

Slowly he came up the long flight of stone steps, weighted down by
traveling rugs and handbag, both of which he refused to surrender to
the obsequious Francois. Eagerly she rushed down the steps to meet
him, her eyes half-closed, ready to swoon from excitement and joy.
Nothing was said. He opened his arms. She put up her mouth, tenderly,
submissively. For a moment he seemed to hesitate. He held her tight
in his embrace, and just looked down at her. Then, as he felt the
warmth of her soft, yielding body next to his, and saw the partly
opened mouth, ready to receive his kiss, he bent down and fastened his
lips on hers.

CHAPTER XII

For one blissful, ecstatic moment Helen lay tight in his embrace,
nestling against the breast of the one being she loved better than
anyone else in the world, responding with involuntary vibrations of her
own body to the gust of fiery passion that swept his. But only for a
moment. The next instant she had torn herself violently free, and was
gazing, wonderingly, fearfully, up into his face, trying to penetrate
those glasses which veiled, as it were, the windows of his soul. Why
she broke away so abruptly from his embrace she could not herself have
explained. Something within her, some instinct to which her reason was
unable to give a name, made her body revolt against the unusual ardor
of the caress. Strange! Never before had sh