im back to Ithaca, back to the ragged rocks ... to
Tessibel. For a moment he was so agonized that tears stung his lids to a
deep hurt.

If in noisy Paris he had been carried in spirit to the squatter country,
where a girl stood and gazed at him with red-brown eyes, how much more
did she haunt him in the quiet spot where the leaves sang the same old
tunes they sang in her world, where the wind played among them as it did
in the Silent City! Now and then from yonder clump of trees a bird
twittered; an owl screeched from the tall tree at the right, and farther
on a brook chanted its purling song like Tessibel's brook under the
mudcellar. Oh, his dear little girl! His Tess of the Storm Country! If
in those olden days he had desired her, now that desire was a hundred
times more poignant. In all his willful life he had never suffered like
this. Tess with her clinging arms, her sweet, winning ways! He sighed a
deep, long sigh. Yet soon he would hear something from her. He had
written her, ... had sent her money for the necessities of her simple
life ... his heart throbbed at the thought of a letter from her.

Madelene's conversation he had not heard, and it was not until she spoke
directly to him that he remembered her presence.

"Don't you think so, Fred?" she was asking.

He heaved another sigh as he left Ithaca and came back to France after
that flight of fancy.

"Don't I think what? I really didn't hear what you said, Madelene," he
admitted guiltily.

Madelene experienced a hot flash of indignation.

"Do you mean to say you've allowed me to talk all this time and you
haven't heard a word I've said?" she demanded in a thin, rasping voice.

"I'm sorry," murmured Frederick. "Pardon."

Then the girl lapsed into a sulky silence, and Frederick, too sick at
heart, too indifferent to her likes and dislikes to care, did not
encourage her to repeat what she had said.

It was perhaps a week later when young Mrs. Graves felt her first real
jealousy. In the happiness of her hasty marriage, she had almost
forgotten the story told her by the gossips of Ithaca. It was only when
her husband's eyes were encircled and darkened by a far-away expression
that Tess entered her mind. But even then, after a glance in the mirror,
she dismissed the little singer contemptuously.

One morning just before breakfast, they were standing under the trees.
On Frederick's face was that dreary look of discontent. Madelene
contemplated him steadil