ff for a few days to think it over." Was the trouble
associated with George Bolingbroke? Did she mind the gossip? Did she
think I should mind it? Whatever it was, why didn't she come to me and
weep it out on my breast? "I didn't want to disturb you at this time."
At this time? That was because of the South Midland and Atlantic
Railroad. "Damn the South Midland and Atlantic Railroad!" I said again
under my breath.

The red neck of the bald-headed man in front of me suddenly turned.

"Going down for a little hunting?" he enquired genially, "there isn't
much else, I reckon, to take a man like you down into this half-baked
country. I hear the partridges are getting scarce, and they are going to
bring a bill into the Legislature forbidding the sending of them outside
of the state. Now, that's a direct slap, I say, at the small farmer. A
bird is a bird, ain't it, even if it's a Virginia partridge?"

I rose and took up my overcoat. "I'll go into the smoking-car. They keep
it too hot here."

He nodded cheerfully. "I was in there myself, but it's like an oven,
too, so I came out." Then he unfolded his newspaper, and I passed
hurriedly down the aisle of the coach.

In the smoking-car the air was like the fumes in the stemming room of a
tobacco factory, but lighting a cigar, I leaned back on one of the hard,
plush-covered seats, and stared out at the low, pale landscape beyond
the window. It was late November, and the sombre colours of the fields
and of the leafless trees showed through a fine autumnal mist, which
lent an atmosphere of melancholy to the stretches of fallow land, to the
harvested corn-fields, in which the stubble stood in rows, like a
headless army, and to the long red-clay road winding, deep in mud, to
the distant horizon.

"I am in trouble--I am in trouble," I heard always above the roar of the
train, above the shrill whistle of the engine, as it rounded a curve,
above the thin, drawling voices of my fellow-passengers, disputing a
question in politics. "I am in trouble," ran the words. "What trouble?
What trouble? What trouble?" I repeated passionately, while my teeth bit
into my cigar, and the flame went out. "So George hasn't let her out of
his sight for two years, and I did not know it. For two years! And in
these two years how much have I seen of her--of Sally, my wife? We have
been living separate lives under the same roof, and when she asked me
for bread, I have given her--pearls!" A passion of remors