The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Helpmate, by May Sinclair

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Title: The Helpmate

Author: May Sinclair

Release Date: February 26, 2006 [eBook #17867]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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THE HELPMATE

by

MAY SINCLAIR

Author of "The Divine Fire," "Superseded," "Audrey Craven," Etc.

New York
Henry Holt and Company
1907
The Quinn & Boden Co. Press
Rahway, N.J.

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

It was four o'clock in the morning. Mrs. Walter Majendie still lay on
the extreme edge of the bed, with her face turned to the dim line of sea
discernible through the open window of the hotel bedroom.

Since midnight, when she had gone to bed, she had lain in that
uncomfortable position, motionless, irremediably awake. Mrs. Walter
Majendie was thinking.

At first the night had gone by her unperceived, black and timeless. Now
she could measure time by the dull progress of the dawn among the objects
in the room. A slow, unhappy thing, born between featureless grey cloud
and sea, it had travelled from the window, shimmered in the watery square
of the looking-glass, and was feeling for the chair where her husband had
laid his clothes down last night. He had thought she was asleep, and had
gone through his undressing noiselessly, with movements of angelic and
elaborate gentleness that well-nigh disarmed her thought. He was sleeping
now. She tried not to hear the sound of his placid breathing. Only the
other night, their wedding night, she had lain awake at this hour and
heard it, and had turned her face towards him where he lay in the divine
unconsciousness of sleep. The childlike, huddled posture of the sleeper
had then stirred her heart to an unimaginable tenderness.

Now she had got to think, to adjust a new and devastating idea to a
beloved and divine belief.

Somewhere in the quiet town a church clock clanged to the dawn, and the
sleeper stretched himself. The five hours' torture of her thinking wr