and chaos of utter
bewilderment, as reason crept haltingly back to her seat, his first
blind and indeterminate rage fell away from him. His first black and
blinding clouds of suspicion slowly subsided before practical and
orderly question and cross-question. Thought adjusted itself to its
new environment. Painfully, yet cautiously, he directed his ceaseless
artillery of interrogation toward the outer and darker walls of
uncertainty still so blankly confronting him.

It was not that he had been consumed by any direct sense of loss, of
deprivation. It was not that he had feared open and immediate
treachery. If a rage had burned through him, at the sudden and
startling sight of his own wife thus secretly masquerading in an
unknown role, it was far from being a rage or mere jealousy and
distrust.

They had, in other days, each passed through questionable and perilous
experiences. Both together and alone they had adventured unwillingly
along many of the more dubious channels of life. They had surrendered
to temptation; they had sown and reaped and suffered, and become weary
of it. They had struggled slowly yet stoically up towards
respectability; they had fought for fair-dealing; they had entered a
compact to stand by each other through that long and bitter effort to
be tardily honest and autumnally aboveboard.

What now so disturbed and disheartened him was the sudden sense of
something impending, the vague apprehension of some momentous and
far-reaching intrigue which he could not even foreshadow. And it was
framing itself into being at a time when he had most prayed for their
untrammelled freedom, when he had most looked for their ultimate
emancipation from the claws of that too usurious past.

But, above all, what had brought about the sudden change? Why had no
inkling of it crept to his ears? Why was she, the passionate pleader
for the decencies of life whom he had last watched so patiently and
heroically imparting the mastery of the pianoforte to seven little
English children in a squalid Paris _pension_, now lapsing back into
the old and fiercely abjured avenue of irresponsibility? Why had she
weakened and surrendered, when he himself, the oldtime weakling of the
two, had clung so desperately to the narrow path of rectitude? And
what was the meaning and the direction of it all? And what would it
lead to? But why, above all, had she kept silent, and given him no
warning?

Durkin looked up and list