or folly."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"You haven't tried to play the game," he answered tensely. "For months
you've been withdrawing into your shell. You've been clanking your
chains and half-heartedly wishing for some mysterious power to strike
them off. It wasn't a thing you undertook lightly. It isn't a
thing--marriage, I mean--that you hold lightly. That being the case, you
would have been wise to try making the best of it, instead of making the
worst of it. But you let yourself drift into a state of mind where
you--well, you see the result. I saw it coming. I didn't need to happen
in this afternoon to know that there were undercurrents of feeling
swirling about. And so the way you feel now is in itself a penalty. If
you let Monohan cut any more figure in your thoughts, you'll pay bigger
in the end."

"I can't help my thoughts, or I should say my feelings," she said
wearily.

"You think you love him," Fyfe made low reply. "As a matter of fact, you
love what you think he is. I daresay that he has sworn his affection by
all that's good and great. But if you were convinced that he didn't
really care, that his flowery protestations had a double end in view,
would you still love him?"

"I don't know," she murmured. "But that's beside the point. I do love
him. I know it's unwise. It's a feeling that has overwhelmed me in a
way that I didn't believe possible, that I had hoped to avoid. But--but
I can't pretend, Jack. I don't want you to misunderstand. I don't want
this to make us both miserable. I don't want it to generate an
atmosphere of suspicion and jealousy. We'd only be fighting about a
shadow. I never cheated at anything in my life. You can trust me still,
can't you?"

"Absolutely," Fyfe answered without hesitation.

"Then that's all there is to it," she replied, "unless--unless you're
ready to give me up as a hopeless case, and let me go away and blunder
along the best I can."

He shook his head.

"I haven't even considered that," he said. "Very likely it's unwise of
me to say this,--it will probably antagonize you,--but I know Monohan
better than you do. I'd go pretty far to keep you two apart--now--for
your sake."

"It would be the same if it were any other man," she muttered. "I can
understand that feeling in you. It's so--so typically masculine."

"No, you're wrong there, dead wrong," Fyfe frowned. "I'm not a
self-sacrificing brute by any means. Still, knowing that you'll only
live with me