er how she looked
and talked at home where, after all, the only person she could hope to
please was herself? He held aloof, drawn from his aloofness occasionally
by her whim to indulge herself in what she regarded as proofs of his
love. Her pouting, her whimpering, her abject but meaningless
self-depreciation, her tears, were potent, not for the flattering reason
she assigned, but because he, out of pity for her and self-reproach, and
dread of her developing her mother's weakness, would lash himself into
the small show of tenderness sufficient to satisfy her.

And now, steeped in the gall of as bitter a draught as experience forces
folly to drink anew each day to the dregs--the realization that, though
the man marries the money only, he lives with the wife only--Ross had met
Adelaide again. "I'll go to Chicago in the morning," was his conclusion.
"I'll do the honorable thing"--he sneered at himself--"since trying the
other would only result in her laughing at me and in my being still more
miserable."

But when morning came he was critical of the clothes his valet offered
him, spent an hour in getting himself groomed for public appearance, then
appeared at the Country Club for breakfast instead of driving to the
station. And after breakfast, he put off his departure "until to-morrow
or next day," and went to see Mr. and Mrs. Hastings. And what more
natural then than that Henrietta should take him to the Villa d'Orsay "to
show you how charmingly Del has installed herself." "And perhaps," said
Henrietta, "she and Arden Wilmot will go for a drive. He has quit the
bank because they objected to his resting two hours in the middle of the
day." What more natural than that Adelaide should alter her resolution
under the compulsion of circumstance, should spend the entire morning in
the gardens, she with Ross, Henrietta with Arden? Finally, to avoid
strain upon her simple domestic arrangements in that period of
retrenchment, what more natural than falling in with Ross's proposal of
lunch at Indian Mound? And who ever came back in a hurry from Indian
Mound, with its quaint vast earthworks, its ugly, incredibly ancient
potteries and flint instruments that could be uncovered anywhere with the
point of a cane or parasol; its superb panorama, bounded by the far blue
hills where, in days that were ancient when history began, fires were
lighted by sentinels to signal the enemy's approach to a people whose
very dust, whose very name has