down with her for the first week-end.

It was a tiny place. But some one had built a comfortable
smoking-room at the back. It opened by glass doors into the garden.

One Sunday evening they were sitting together in the smoking-room
when she flung herself down on the floor beside him and laid her
head on his knee. She seized his hand and drew it down to her.

"As you are going to leave me to-morrow," she said, "you can stroke
my hair to-night."

He went down every week-end. And every week-end he found an
improvement in his wife's health. When he complimented her upon her
appearance, she told him she had been gardening. He took it as an
excellent sign that she should be fond of gardening.

Then one day Gibson (who worked like ten horses to provide all the
things that his wife wanted) got ill and was told to take a month
off in the country.

That was in the middle of the week. He saw his doctor early in the
evening and took the last train down. The cottage was several miles
from the nearest telegraph office, so that he arrived before the
wire that should have announced his coming.

A short cut from the station brought him to the back of the house
through a little wood that screened it. The wood path led into his
garden by a private gate which was always locked.

He climbed the gate and crossed the grass plot to the glass doors of
the smoking-room. The lamps were lit there, and Gibson, as he
approached, could see his wife sitting in the low chair opposite
his. His heart bounded at the sight of her. He was glad to think
that she sat in his room when he was away. He walked quickly over
the grass and stood at the glass doors looking in.

She was lying back in the low chair. In _his_ chair, which a curtain
had concealed from him until now, there sat a man he knew. He
recognized the narrow shoulders and the head with the sleek brown
hair, showing a little sallow patch of baldness at the back. From a
certain tenseness in the man's attitude he knew that his gaze was
fastened on the woman who faced them. Her left arm was raised, its
long, loose sleeve fell back and bared it. Her fingers twisted and
untwisted a little straying curl.

The man could bear it no longer. He jumped up and went to her. He
knelt beside her. With one hand he seized her arm by the full white
wrist and dragged it down and held it to his lips. The other hand
smoothed back her hair into its place and held it there. His fine,
nervous fingers sank th