o start on a long tour with his wife. We had never foreseen
that: he seemed rooted in his New York habits and convinced that the
whole social and financial machinery of the metropolis would cease to
function if he did not keep an eye on it through the columns of his
morning paper, and pronounce judgment on it in the afternoon at his
club. But something new had happened to him: he caught a cold, which was
followed by a touch of pleurisy, and instantly he perceived the intense
interest and importance which ill-health may add to life. He took the
fullest advantage of it. A discerning doctor recommended travel in a
warm climate; and suddenly, the morning paper, the afternoon club, Fifth
Avenue, Wall Street, all the complex phenomena of the metropolis, faded
into insignificance, and the rest of the terrestrial globe, from being
a mere geographical hypothesis, useful in enabling one to determine the
latitude of New York, acquired reality and magnitude as a factor in the
convalescence of Mr. Philip Trant.

"His wife was absorbed in preparations for the journey. To move him
was like mobilizing an army, and weeks before the date set for their
departure it was almost as if she were already gone.

"This foretaste of separation showed us what we were to each other. Yet
I was letting her go--and there was no help for it, no way of preventing
it. Resistance was as useless as the vain struggles in a nightmare. She
was Trant's and not mine: part of his luggage when he travelled as she
was part of his household furniture when he stayed at home....

"The day she told me that their passages were taken--it was on a
November afternoon, in her drawing-room in town--I turned away from her
and, going to the window, stood looking out at the torrent of traffic
interminably pouring down Fifth Avenue. I watched the senseless
machinery of life revolving in the rain and mud, and tried to picture
myself performing my small function in it after she had gone from me.

"'It can't be--it can't be!' I exclaimed.

"'What can't be?'

"I came back into the room and sat down by her. 'This--this--' I hadn't
any words. 'Two weeks!' I said. 'What's two weeks?"

"She answered, vaguely, something about their thinking of Spain for the
spring--

"'Two weeks--two weeks!' I repeated. 'And the months we've lost--the
days that belonged to us!'

"'Yes,' she said, 'I'm thankful it's settled.'

"Our words seemed irrelevant, haphazard. It was as if each were
ans