oes it, dear?" said he.

"Let me see the samples," Margaret returned with an effort. There
were depths beyond depths; there were bottomless quicksands in a lie.
How could she have known?

That night Wilbur looked into his wife's bedroom at midnight.
"Awake?" he asked in his monosyllabic fashion.

"Yes."

"Say, old girl, Von Rosen has just this minute gone. Guess it's a
match fast enough."

"I always thought it would be Alice," returned Margaret wearily. Love
affairs did seem so trivial to her at this juncture.

"Alice Mendon has never cared a snap about getting married any way,"
returned Wilbur. "Some women are built that way. She is."

Margaret did not inquire how he knew. If Wilbur had told her that he
had himself asked Alice in marriage, it would have been as if she had
not heard. All such things seemed very unimportant to her in the
awful depths of her lie. She said good-night in answer to Wilbur's
and again fell to thinking. There was no way out, absolutely no way.
She must live and die with this secret self-knowledge which abased
her, gnawing at the heart. Wilbur had told her that he believed that
her authorship of _The Poor Lady_ might be the turning point of his
election. She was tongue-tied in a horrible spiritual sense. She was
disfigured for the rest of her life and she could never once turn
away her eyes from her disfigurement.

The light from Annie Eustace's window shone in her room for two hours
after that. She wondered what she was doing and guessed Annie was
writing a new novel to take the place of the one of which she had
robbed her. An acute desire which was like a pain to be herself the
injured instead of the injurer possessed her. Oh, what would it mean
to be Annie sitting there, without leisure to brood over her new
happiness, working, working, into the morning hours and have nothing
to look upon except moral and physical beauty in her mental
looking-glass. She envied the poor girl, who was really working
beyond her strength, as she had never envied any human being. The
envy stung her, and she could not sleep. The next morning she looked
ill and then she had to endure Wilbur's solicitude.

"Poor girl, you overworked writing your splendid book," he said. Then
he suggested that she spend a month at an expensive seashore resort
and another horror was upon Margaret. Wilbur, she well knew, could
not afford to send her to such a place, but was innocently, albeit
rather shamefacedly, assuming t