y we had remained ideal friends. I shall
always be as much interested in your welfare as in my own.--Yes, more.
I should never dream of marrying again, myself, but in time I think it
might be well for you to divorce me and do so." Her mobile face became
introspective, absorbed. "Ruth Lawrence is rather too sentimental, not
energetic enough for a professor's wife. And Nora Mills is heartless.
I think {148} she would marry you for a home, but you must n't let her
do it. There is Evelyn Ames. I think Evelyn would do. She is so gentle
and reliable!"

She was actually absorbed in this problem, her husband perceived to
his utter amazement. He shivered with distaste. This was too
grotesque. It could not be true.

His wife looked at him for approval. She noted that the look of fear
was gone from his dark eyes. Something unwonted, ironic, flashed there
in its stead. It was neither mirth nor malice, yet approached both. He
set his boyish-looking mouth firmly, and shook off his silence as one
throws off a nightmare. He would meet her on her own ground, and be as
indifferent as she.

"Really, Clarissa, _that_ is the first sensible thing you have said
this {149} afternoon," he forced himself to say.--"Why, what's this?"

It was the small daughter of the house who chose this moment to emerge
from under the table, clutching fast a jaded-looking doll and a
handful of its belongings. Her round eyes were fear-struck and her
quick glance curiously hostile, but she slipped silently from the
room. Her presence there was soon forgotten by her parents--but
children do not forget. Of all the incomprehensible words tossed to
and fro above her head, Marvel remembered every one.

II

Marvel Charleroy found the letter in the box at the gate where the
postman had left it. There was other mail; she glanced at the covers
light-heartedly as she went toward the house. She was {150} not very
familiar with her mother's handwriting and, for the moment, did not
recognize it.

The house was low, gray-shingled, and inviting. It had a kindly, human
aspect, and though it was a modern structure built at the time of
Professor Charleroy's second marriage, eleven years before, there was
about it some thing of that quiet dignity we associate with age. The
branches of a wide-spreading old elm swept one of its chimneys; the
lawn was broad, the lilacs and syringas tall; ranks of high hollyhocks
in shades of rose and wine, rising