sult my wife about my
office appointments."

"It isn't honesty; but I couldn't stand having you change your
mind when--"

"When my wife tells me to? I promise you not to do that."

Wayne found that the interview was over, although he had not been able to
express his gratitude.

"I know what you are feeling," said Farron. "Good-by."

"I can't understand why you are doing it, Mr. Farron; but--"

"It needn't matter to you. Good-by."

With a sensation that in another instant he might be out of the house,
Wayne metaphorically caught at the door-post.

"I must see Mathilde before I go," he said.

Farron shook his head.

"No, not to-day."

"She's terribly afraid I am going to be moved by insults to desert her,"
Wayne urged.

"I'll see she understands. I'll send for you in a day or two; then it
will be all right." They shook hands. He was glad Farron showed him out
through the corridor and not through the study, where, he knew, Mrs.
Farron was still waiting like a fine, sleek cat at a rat-hole.

CHAPTER XV

During this interview Adelaide sat in her husband's study and waited. She
looked back upon that other period of suspense--the hour when she had
waited at the hospital during his operation--as a time of comparative
peace. She had been able then, she remembered, to sit still, to pursue,
if not a train of thought, at least a set of connected images; but now
her whole spirit seemed to be seething with a sort of poison that made
her muscles jerk and start and her mind dart and faint. Then she had
foreseen loss through the fate common to humanity; now she foresaw it
through the action of her own tyrannical contempt for anything that
seemed to her weak.

She had never rebelled against coercion from Vincent. She had even loved
it, but she had loved it when he had seemed to her a superior being;
coercion from one who only yesterday had been under the dominion of
nerves and nurses was intolerable to her. She was at heart a courtier,
would do menial service to a king, and refuse common civility to an
inferior. She knew how St. Christopher had felt at seeing his satanic
captain tremble at the sign of the cross; and though, unlike the saint,
she had no intention of setting out to discover the stronger lord, she
knew that he might now any day appear.

From any one not an acknowledged superior that shut door was an insult to
be avenged, and she sat and waited for the moment to arrive when she
would most adequa