fute and
explain away any ordinary reason for her possession of the drug, he
remembered, in a comprehensive flash the recent violent changes in her
character--her uncontrollable attacks of nervousness, her spasmodic
movements and her sudden flowing, almost hysterical, volubility of
speech. His heart contracted with a sensation like that of terror, and
he was turning away again when his glance was arrested by a heap of
crumpled bills lying loosely in one corner of the open drawer.
Recollecting that she had complained the day before of the smallness of
her allowance, he drew out the papers for a casual examination--but it
needed much less, in fact, than this to assure him that her expenses had
not only gone immeasurably beyond her own limited allowance, but that
they had considerably exceeded his slightly larger income. Her debts had
evidently run up to a sum which she had lost the courage to confess even
to herself, and, while the gravity of the situation entered into him, he
smoothed out the torn and crumpled sheets and went with them to his
study. Until to-night he had looked upon Connie's extravagance merely as
an innocent childish failing, resulting from an inherent incapacity, as
she laughingly said, "to do sums," but now as he sat under the green
lamp shade, anxiously multiplying item after item, it seemed to him that
this recent recklessness involved not only her private happiness but
his own personal honour. He was a hot-tempered man by nature, and at
first the very absurdity of her expenditures, the useless, costly
trifles which made up the amount, produced in him an unreasoning passion
of anger. Had she been in the house he would have gone to her in the
first shock of his temper, but her ceaseless pursuit of pleasure had put
her beyond his reach, so he sat silently staring at the neatly arranged
heap of papers while his exasperation cooled within him.

Presently, still sitting motionless in his chair, he felt the absolute
quiet of the room take effect upon his mood, and with the peculiar
tolerance confirmed as much by balked ambition as by years of enforced
and bitter patience he began with a philosophic and impersonal leniency
to soften in his judgment of Connie's case. At the moment there was no
tenderness, he told himself, in the view he took, and he gave to her
merely the distant, habitual charity that he would have extended to the
stranger in the street. To give to her in the very least seemed to him
sudde