n and she refolded it with hands not steady.

He did not speak until she had sealed the letter and was sitting there
looking down at her hands, rubbing them a little, as if her interest was
in them. "Marion," he asked, and his voice shook now, "doesn't it ever
seem to you that life is too valuable to throw away like this?" She made
no reply and angered by her unresponsiveness he added sharply: "It's
rather dangerous, you know."

She looked up at him then. "Is this a threat?" she asked with a faint,
mocking smile.

He moved angrily, starting to leave the room. "Have you no feeling?" he
broke out at her. "Is this all you _want_ from life?"

She colored and retorted: "It was not the way I expected to live when I
married you."

He stood there doggedly for a moment, his face working with nervousness.
"I think then," he said roughly, "that we'd better be decent enough to
get a divorce!" At what he saw in her face he cried passionately: "Oh
no, you don't believe in divorce--but you believe in _this_!"

"Was it _I_ who brought it about?" she cried, stung to anger.

She had risen and for an instant they stood there facing each other.
"Haven't you any humanity?" he shot rudely at her. "Don't you ever
_feel_?"

She colored but drew back, in command of herself again. "I do not
desecrate my feelings," she said with composure; "I don't degrade my
humanity."

"Feeling--humanity!" he sneered, and wheeled about and left the room.

He started at once for his rehearsal. He was trembling with anger and
yet underneath that passion was an unacknowledged feeling of relief. It
had seemed that he had to do something; now he told himself that he had
done what he could. He walked slowly through the soft night, seeking
control. He was very bitter toward Marion, and yet in his heart he knew
that he had asked for what he no longer wanted. He quickened his step
toward the Lawrences', where they were to hold the rehearsal, where he
would find Ruth Holland.

CHAPTER EIGHT

After the maelstrom of passion had thrown her out where life left her
time to think about what she had felt, Ruth Holland would wonder whether
there was something in her that made her different from the good people
of the world. Through it all she did not have the feeling that it would
seem she would have; what she did did not make her feel as she knew,
when she came to think it out, she would be supposed to feel about such
a thing. In hours that would be most