spond? For it often happens that the more direct a woman is, the
more in her feminine heart is she elusive.

Clean-built, clean-hearted, clean-eyed, of that clean complexion which
suggests the open air, Eleanor impressed you with a sense of bodily and
mental wholesomeness. Her taste in dress ran in the direction of plain
tailor-made gowns (I am told, by the way, that these can be fairly
expensive), and shrank instinctively from the frills and fripperies to
which daughters of Eve are notoriously addicted. She spoke in a clear
voice which some called hard, though I never found it so; she carried
herself proudly. Chaste in thought, frank in deed, she was a perfect
specimen of the highly bred, purely English type of woman who, looking
at facts squarely in the face, accepts them as facts and does not allow
her imagination to dally in any atmosphere wherein they may be invested.
To this type a vow is irrefragable. Loyalty is inherent in her like
her blood. She never changes. What feminine inconsistencies she had
at fifteen she retains at five-and-twenty, and preserves to add to the
charms of her old age. She is the exemplary wife, the great-hearted
mother of children. She has sent her sons in thousands to fight her
country's battles overseas. Those things which lie in the outer temper
of her soul she gives lavishly. That which is hidden in her inner shrine
has to be wrested from her by the one hand she loves. Was mine that
hand?

It will be perceived that I was beginning to take life seriously.

Eleanor must have also perceived something of the sort; for during our
talk she said irrelevantly:

"You've changed!"

"In what way?" I asked.

"I don't know. You're not the same as you were. I seem to know you
better in some ways, and yet I seem to know you less. Why is it?"

I said, "No one can go through the Valley of the Grotesque as I have
done without suffering some change."

"I don't see why you should call it 'the Valley of the Grotesque.'"

I smiled at her instinctive rejection of the fanciful.

"Don't you? Call it the Valley of the Shadow, if you like. But don't
you think the attendant circumstances were rather mediaeval, gargoyley,
Orcagnesque? Don't you think the whole passage lacked the dignity which
one associates with the Valley of the Shadow of Death?"

"You mean the murder?" she said with a faint shiver.

"That," said I, "might be termed the central feature. Just look at
things as they happened. I am con