'The deuce!'

'I mean it in an inoffensive sense. She and I are rather too much alike,
I fancy.'

'How do you mean?' asked Reardon, puzzled, and not very well pleased.

'There's a great deal of pure intellect about Miss Yule, you know. She
was sure to choose a man of the passionate kind.'

'I think you are talking nonsense, my dear fellow.'

'Well, perhaps I am. To tell you the truth, I have by no means completed
my study of women yet. It is one of the things in which I hope to be a
specialist some day, though I don't think I shall ever make use of it in
novels--rather, perhaps, in life.'

Three days--two days--one day.

Now let every joyous sound which the great globe can utter ring forth
in one burst of harmony! Is it not well done to make the village-bells
chant merrily when a marriage is over? Here in London we can have no
such music; but for us, my dear one, all the roaring life of the great
city is wedding-hymn. Sweet, pure face under its bridal-veil! The face
which shall, if fate spare it, be as dear to me many a long year hence
as now at the culminating moment of my life!

As he trudged on in the dark, his tortured memory was living through
that time again. The images forced themselves upon him, however much he
tried to think of quite other things--of some fictitious story on which
he might set to work. In the case of his earlier books he had waited
quietly until some suggestive 'situation,' some group of congenial
characters, came with sudden delightfulness before his mind and urged
him to write; but nothing so spontaneous could now be hoped for. His
brain was too weary with months of fruitless, harassing endeavour;
moreover, he was trying to devise a 'plot,' the kind of literary
Jack-in-the-box which might excite interest in the mass of readers, and
this was alien to the natural working of his imagination. He suffered
the torments of nightmare--an oppression of the brain and heart which
must soon be intolerable.

CHAPTER VI. THE PRACTICAL FRIEND

When her husband had set forth, Amy seated herself in the study and took
up a new library volume as if to read. But she had no real intention of
doing so; it was always disagreeable to her to sit in the manner of one
totally unoccupied, with hands on lap, and even when she consciously
gave herself up to musing an open book was generally before her. She did
not, in truth, read much nowadays; since the birth of her child she had
seemed to care less than