so strong is habit, that she then hurried into her
husband's arms and had her cry upon his breast.

XI

I imagine that thereafter for a time John Fulton's attitude toward Lucy
was now dignified and manly, and now almost childlike in its despair.
Having made her love him once, he must have felt at first that he could
make her love him again. I imagine him making love to her with all the
chivalry and poetry that was in him, and then breaking off short to
rail against fate, against the whole treacherous race of women,
perhaps, and to ask what he had done to deserve so much suffering?
"Why didn't you do this to me when I was proposing? Why did you wait
till I was stone broke and worried half sick, with everything going
from bad to worse? Is it anything I've done, anything I've failed to
do? Why, Lucy, we were such a model of happiness that people looked up
to us. How can anybody suddenly stop caring the way you have? If it
had been gradual! But you were in love with me the night I went away,
weren't you? _Weren't_ you?"

Here he catches her shoulders and forces that one admission from her,
and makes the great praying woebegone eyes meet his. Then, almost, he
pushes her away from him.

"And I go away for a few days," he cries, "and come back and everything
is changed. I who had a sweetheart, haven't even a wife. Why have you
changed so? There must be a reason? What is it? Are you sick? Have
you eaten something that has made you forget? Have you been bewitched?
That's no fool question. Have you? Have you?"

"Have I what?"

"Have you been bewitched? Tell me, dear, who has done this thing to
you?"

Again he has her by the shoulders.

"Lucy, is there someone? Never mind the other things, just tell me
that? You've gotten to like someone else? Is that it?"

And Lucy must have answered that there was no one else. And there is
no question but that to the best of her belief and knowledge she was
telling the truth.

But the mere thought that there might be someone else had moved Fulton
as he had never been moved before. He once told me that even as a
little boy he had never in all his life known one pang of jealousy. He
will never be able to make that boast again. And like some damned
insidious tropical malaria, the passion has taken root in his system,
so that only death can wholly cure him.

Like some vile reptile it had found within him some cave from which it
might emerge to brandish