d at all this gossip. It was
clear as daylight, he said. His master was tired of being married so
long to the same woman, and as to madame, she also was weary of being
married to the same man, so each had decided to try a little change,
whereupon Lizzie, the second waitress--a buxom Irish girl who despised
"furriners" in general and Japanese in particular--bid Oku hold his
tongue and not jabber such heathenish nonsense.

But if the situation was productive of much unconscious humor in
servants' hall, it was different upstairs. To Robert Stafford it was
all serious enough, a tragedy which had suddenly blasted his life, and
night after night as he sat alone in the library, making a hollow
pretence at work, forcing his mind on a book or newspaper when really
his thoughts were miles away, he wondered how he could have been such
a fool as to allow his happiness slip through his fingers.

Now that Virginia was really gone, he realized what she had been to
him and what he had lost. At the outset, he had taken it lightly,
resentfully. He schooled himself to appear indifferent, afraid that he
would be surrendering some of his pride if he displayed the slightest
weakness. To himself he argued that if she chose to quarrel with him
and disturb the harmony of their home on such a trivial pretext, he
would be a poor weak fool to permit a woman to bully him and question
rights which were of the very essence of his manhood. If she preferred
to make a fuss and go her own way he could not prevent her. But when
the door had closed behind her, when he saw that she was really in
earnest, that she had been willing to give up all this comfort, all
this luxury, to return to a precarious existence, a life of
humiliation and self-denial, and all this for a mere matter of
principle, he was startled.

The railroad promoter had never troubled to think deeply on matters
outside his material interests. Of religion, he had none, and he
seldom stopped to consider the ethical side of a question. But all at
once, as by a miracle, the scales fell from his eyes. In a sudden
flash of illuminating reason he saw himself as he was--selfish,
cynical, inconsiderate, brutal. He was astounded at finding himself
compelled to admit the truth of these self-made charges. He did not
mean to be all these things. At heart he was a good fellow. It was
simply the fault of his training. He saw now the truth of what in his
egotism and cynicism he had always scoffed at bef