detestation was but an added torture. There were times
even, and this was so now, when she sought by bodily force to gain
possession of the drug which she had hidden under the carpet or beneath
the pillows of the couch, and in order to control her struggles, he was
obliged to resort to his greater physical strength. After this she
looked up and cursed him with a wonderful florid, almost oriental
splendour of language, while throwing off his coat, he brushed from him
the hanging shreds of the torn pink chiffon gown.

At seven o'clock in the morning when the nurse came to relieve him, he
was still sitting, as he had sat all night, in a chair beside Connie's
bed.

"So she has had one of her bad attacks, I feared it," said the nurse,
with a sympathetic glance directed less at Connie than at her husband.

"Yes, it was bad," repeated Adams quietly; and then rising to his feet
he staggered like a drunken man into his bedroom across the hall. Still
wearing his evening clothes he flung himself heavily upon the sofa and
fell at once into the profound sleep of acute bodily exhaustion. Two
hours later when he awoke to take the coffee which the kindly nurse
brought to him, he found that his slumber, instead of refreshing him,
had left him sunk in a sluggish melancholy with a clogged and inactive
brain.

"She is very quiet now," said the woman, a tall, strong person of middle
age, "and strangely enough the spell has hardly weakened her at all--she
has had her breakfast and speaks of going out for a little shopping
after luncheon."

"Well, that's good news!" exclaimed Adams heartily, as he hastily
swallowed his black coffee. Then, holding out his cup to be refilled, he
shook his head with the winning humorous smile which was his solitary
beauty. "This coffee will have to write two pages in my magazine," he
said, "so pour abundantly, if you please."

Sitting there in his dishevelled evening clothes, with his thin, sallow
face under his rumpled hair, he made hardly an impressive figure even
when viewed in the effulgent light of romance as a devoted husband.
There was nothing of the heroic in his appearance; and yet as the nurse
looked down upon him she felt something of the curious attraction he had
for men like Arnold Kemper or Perry Bridewell--men whose innate
principles of life differed so widely from his own. It was impossible to
build a sentimental fiction about him, she thought--he had no place
among the broad shouldered, a