cern for her, the feminine in her leaning on the man in him with a
conscious intensity of abandonment. He put her in the hansom, and her
hand stole into his in the darkness. A tear or two rose, and she let
them fall. It was so delicious to cry over imaginary troubles!

That evening, after dinner, he surprised her by reverting to the
subject of his talk. He combined a man's dislike of uncomfortable
questions with an almost feminine skill in eluding them; and she knew
that if he returned to the subject he must have some special reason for
doing so.

"You seem not to have cared for what I said this afternoon. Did I put
the case badly?"

"No--you put it very well."

"Then what did you mean by saying that you would rather not have me go
on with it?"

She glanced at him nervously, her ignorance of his intention deepening
her sense of helplessness.

"I don't think I care to hear such things discussed in public."

"I don't understand you," he exclaimed. Again the feeling that his
surprise was genuine gave an air of obliquity to her own attitude. She
was not sure that she understood herself.

"Won't you explain?" he said with a tinge of impatience.

Her eyes wandered about the familiar drawing-room which had been the
scene of so many of their evening confidences. The shaded lamps, the
quiet-colored walls hung with mezzotints, the pale spring flowers
scattered here and there in Venice glasses and bowls of old Sevres,
recalled, she hardly knew why, the apartment in which the evenings of
her first marriage had been passed--a wilderness of rosewood and
upholstery, with a picture of a Roman peasant above the mantel-piece,
and a Greek slave in "statuary marble" between the folding-doors of the
back drawing-room. It was a room with which she had never been able to
establish any closer relation than that between a traveller and a
railway station; and now, as she looked about at the surroundings which
stood for her deepest affinities--the room for which she had left that
other room--she was startled by the same sense of strangeness and
unfamiliarity. The prints, the flowers, the subdued tones of the old
porcelains, seemed to typify a superficial refinement that had no
relation to the deeper significances of life.

Suddenly she heard her husband repeating his question.

"I don't know that I can explain," she faltered.

He drew his arm-chair forward so that he faced her across the hearth.
The light of a reading-lamp fell on