she appeared singing in the chapel on the night when she had drawn the
page-boy, Thomas, from his slumbers; and the third, also a photograph,
taken by some local amateur, of her and Morris standing together on the
beach and engaged evidently in eager discussion.

From these three pictures, and especially from Morris's sketch, which
showed the spiritual light shining in her eyes, and her face rapt, as
it were, in a very ecstasy of music, Mary was able to fashion with some
certainty the likeness of the living woman. The more she studied this
the more she found it formidable, and the more she understood how it
came about that her husband had fallen into folly. Also, she learned
to understand that there might be greater weight and meaning in his
confession than she had been inclined to allow to it at the time; that,
at any rate, its extravagances ought not to be set down entirely, as
her father-in-law had suggested with such extreme cleverness, to the
vagaries of a mind suffering from sudden shock and alarm.

All these conclusions made Mary anxious, by wrapping her husband round
with common domestic cares and a web of daily, social incident, to
bury the memory of this Stella beneath ever-thickening strata of
forgetfulness; not that in themselves these reminiscences, however
hallowed, could do her any further actual harm; but because the train of
thought evoked thereby was, as she conceived, morbid, and dangerous to
the balance of his mind.

The plan seemed wise and good, and, in the case of most men, probably
would have succeeded. Yet in Morris's instance from the commencement
it was a failure. She had begun by making his story and ideas, absurd
enough on the face of them, an object of somewhat acute sarcasm, if
not of ridicule. This was a mistake, since thereby she caused him to
suppress every outward evidence of them; to lock them away in the most
secret recesses of his heart. If the lid of a caldron full of fluid is
screwed down while a fire continues to burn beneath it, the steam which
otherwise would have passed away harmlessly, gathers and struggles till
the moment of inevitable catastrophe. The fact that for a while the
caldron remains inert and the steam invisible is no indication of
safety. To attain safety in such a case either the fire must be raked
out or the fluid tapped. Mary had screwed down the lid of her domestic
caldron, but the flame still burned beneath, and the water still boiled
within.

This was h