s bachelor
days, and that Mr. Libby had travelled with them. Mr. Maynard appeared
to have left to Mr. Libby the arrangement of his wife's pleasures, the
supervision of her shopping, and the direction of their common journeys
and sojourns; and it seemed to have been indifferent to him whether his
friend was smoking and telling stories with him, or going with his wife
to the opera, or upon such excursions as he had no taste for. She gave
the details of the triangular intimacy with a frank unconsciousness; and
after nine o'clock she returned from a moonlight walk on the beach with
Mr. Libby.

Grace sat waiting for her at the little one's bedside, for Bella had
been afraid to go to sleep alone.

"How good you are!" cried Louise, in a grateful under-tone, as she came
in. She kissed Grace, and choked down a cough with her hand over her
mouth.

"Louise," said Grace sternly, "this is shameful! You forget that you are
married, and ill, too."

"Oh, I'm ever so much better, to-night. The air's just as dry! And you
needn't mind Mr. Libby. He's such an old friend! Besides, I'm sure to
gain the case."

"No matter. Even as a divorced woman, you oughtn't to go on in this
way."

"Well, I would n't, with every one. But it's quite different with Mr.
Libby. And, besides, I have to keep my mind from preying on itself
somehow."

II.

Mrs. Maynard sat in the sun on the seaward-looking piazza of the hotel,
and coughed in the warm air. She told the ladies, as they came out from
breakfast, that she was ever so much better generally, but that she
seemed to have more of that tickling in her throat. Each of them advised
her for good, and suggested this specific and that; and they all asked
her what Miss Breen was doing for her cough. Mrs. Maynard replied,
between the paroxysms, that she did not know: it was some kind of
powders. Then they said they would think she would want to try something
active; even those among them who were homoeopathists insinuated a fine
distrust of a physician of their own sex. "Oh, it's nothing serious,"
Mrs. Maynard explained. "It's just bronchial. The air will do me more
good than anything. I'm keeping out in it all I can."

After they were gone, a queer, gaunt man came and glanced from the
doorway at her. He had one eye in unnatural fixity, and the other set at
that abnormal slant which is said to qualify the owner for looking round
a corner before he gets to it. A droll twist of his mouth seemed par