han a pulling back
from the pauses, little more than retreat, safeguard. It was the pauses
that lived on with him, creating his dreams; her face as she turned it
to him after a silence would sometimes be as if she had been caught into
that world touched to new life--world that waited. They would renew the
light talk as if coming back from something.

He let himself slip into dreaming now; he had told himself that that, at
least, could work no one harm, and in quiet hours, when he smoked,
relaxed, he was now always drawn over where he knew he must not let
himself go. It was as if something stronger than he was all around him.
One drooping hand caressed his dog; he drew in the fragrance from a rose
trellis near by; the leaves of the big tree moved with a gentle little
sound, a sound like the whisper of sweet things; a bird
note--goodnight--floated through the dusk. He was a man whom those
things reached. And in the last year, particularly in those last weeks,
it had come to be that all those things were one with Ruth Holland; to
open to them meant being drawn to her.

He would tell himself that that was wrong, mad; nothing he could tell
himself seemed to have any check on that pull there was on him in the
thought of her. He and his wife were only keeping up the appearance of
marriage. For two years he had not had love. He was not a man who could
learn to live without it. And now all the desirableness of life, hunger
for love, the whole of earth's lure seemed to break in through the
feeling for this girl--that wrong, wonderful feeling that had of itself
flushed his heart to new life.

Sharply he pulled himself about, shifting position as if to affirm his
change of thinking. It turned him from the outer world to his house; he
saw Marion sitting in there at her desk writing a letter. He watched
her, thinking about her, about their lives. She was so poised, so cool;
it would seem, so satisfied. Was she satisfied? Did denial of life leave
nothing to be desired? If there were stirrings for living things they
did not appear to disturb her calm surface. He wondered if a night like
this never touched old things in her, if there were no frettings for
what she had put out of her life.

He watched her small, beautifully shaped dark head, the fine smooth hair
that fell over the little ear he had loved to kiss. She was beautiful;
it was her beauty that had drawn him to her. She was more beautiful than
Ruth Holland, through whom it