dly, 'Get out of the way, you brute!' He swerved violently
on one side, as if the dog were in his path--I don't know how it
happened; God knows _why_ it happened!--he was flung right under the
wheels. He--thank God, he did not suffer, Nell, or know a moment's
terror or regret. He died instantly."

Elinor was silent for long. She sat, with brow clasped tightly in both
hands, looking intently upon the carpet at his feet, trying, he
thought, to understand, to get into a mind too confused to work
receptively what he was saying to her. Presently, still tightly holding
her head, but with more of comprehension in her face, she looked up.

"And the dog?" she asked him. "The little white dog?"

"It's a strange thing about the dog," he told her slowly. "There wasn't
one!"

IT ANSWERED

"And besides all that, the poor little woman is ill," he said. "She
didn't complain much, but she looked like a ghost to-day."

"What is the matter with her now?" his wife asked.

She was lying back in her chair as if she, herself, were a little tired,
and her long white hands busied themselves with four knitting-needles
from which depended the leg of a knickerbocker-stocking intended for
the shapely limb of Everard Barett.

He looked quickly at her with an air of suspicion and offence. "Now?"
he repeated. "What does '_now_' mean, spoken in that tone? I don't want
to talk about Vera if you don't want to hear. You call the little woman
your friend, and ask in that tone, 'What's the matter with her _now_?'"

Mrs Barett knitted on in silence during the agitated minute in which
her husband kicked away the chair on whose seat his feet had been
stretched, sat up, punched the cushion behind him three times with a
vicious fist, and, finding it even then fail intelligently to support
his head, flung it across the room.

"'Matter with her _now_!'" he snorted to himself, in a tone as unlike
that mimicked as possible.

"Vera seems to be generally full of complaints, that's all," the wife
said.

He gave her a furious glance, and stretched a hand backwards for the
newspaper that lay on the table behind him. "We will change the
subject," he said, loftily.

"She has her husband, who is devoted to her," Mrs Barett reminded him,
disregarding the remark.

For answer the man moved impatiently, and angrily slapped one of his
slippered feet over the other.

She smiled upon her knitting. "I daresay her husband isn't the style of
man you admire