spent the evening apart at home in silence, or together at
the theater in a still more painful silence.

At that instant was born in Robert Penn's already overwrought brain
the thought that his wife no longer loved him!

Robert loathed all theatergoing. The mere physical restraint was
torture to so active, high-strung a man, but when it came to a problem
play---- He not unnaturally considered that it represented the full
measure of his devotion to his wife, to spend an evening beside her
listening to the same old jumble of human motives, human passions,
that had occupied him all day long. Hate, jealousy, revenge, greed,
infidelity were the staples of his trade, as it were; the untangling
of law, if not always equity, from the seething mass was his _raison
d'etre_, and moreover paid his coal bills. That Helen was almost
morbidly fond of the theater had long been his heaviest cross.

His thin, dark face looked very worn as he hunched himself into his
overcoat in the hall, and, looking up, saw Helen running down the
stairs, just as she used to do in the dear old sweetheart days,
chattering merrily the while:

"Talk of Protean artists! Vaudeville clamor for me some day--you'll
see! I'll be five characters in twenty-five minutes, and no one of
them Helen Penn!"

And then she looked so altogether exactly the way he liked his wife to
look, that he whispered something quite absurdly lover-like to her as
he put her into the cab. She laughed in an excited, detached way and
made no response in kind, and again his mood changed and a chilly fog
of vague suspicion closed in upon him.

At the theater he leaned back in his seat and watched Helen with eyes
that began to reinventory her personality, seeking to comprehend this
strange exhilaration that had recently uplifted her out of all her
environment.

Once, between the second and third acts, Helen asked Robert for a
pencil and made a note on the margin of her program, which she
laughingly refused to let him read. It was all that was needed to
crystallize his resentment, and muttering something about "a whiff of
tobacco," he got up and went to the lobby.

It so happened that Mr. Flagg, the dignified senior member of their
successful firm, was strolling about alone with a cigarette, and after
greetings between the two Flagg said, in a low tone, to Robert:

"It's all up with your side of the Perry case! The evidence in
rebuttal will knock you higher than Haman. I've just got