our life, rather than you
should have tired your feet. Is that a sin in a woman's eyes?"

A whimsical smile broke over the woman's face. It quivered on her red
lips for just a breath, as if conscious how ill-timed it was. "I
really like to tire my feet," she murmured, and she pointed the toe of
her tiny boot, as if poised to dance, and looked down on it with
evident admiration.

The man caught his breath sharply.

"It's that damned dancing that has upset you, Dora!"

"Sh! Don't swear! I do like dancing! I have always told you so. It was
you who first admired it. It was you who let me learn."

"You were my wife! I thought that meant everything to you that it
meant to me. I loved your beauty because it was yours; your pleasures
because they gave you pleasure. All my ideas of right and wrong in
marriage which I learned in my father's honest house bent to your
desires and happiness."

She looked nervously at the clock. Ten minutes to six.

"Dora--for God's sake look at me! Dora--you're not leaving me?"

It was an almost inarticulate cry, as of a man who had foreseen his
doom, and only protested from some unconquerable instinct to struggle!

She patted his clenched hand gently.

It was plainly evident that she hated the sight of suffering, and
hated more not having her own way, and was possessed by a refined kind
of cowardice.

"Don't make a row, there's a dear boy! It is like this: I am going
over to New York, just for a few weeks. I would have told you
yesterday, only I hated spoiling a nice day. It was a nice day?--with
a scene. You'll find a nice long letter at home--it's a sweet one,
too--telling you all about it. Don't take it too hard! I am going to
earn fifty dollars a week--just fancy that--and don't blame me too
much!"

He didn't seem to hear! He hung his head--the veins in his forehead
swelled--there were actually tears in his eyes--and the mighty effort
he made to restrain a sob was terrible--and six feet of American
manhood, as fine a specimen of the animal as the soil can show,
animated by a spirit which represented well the dignity of toil and
self-respect, stood bowed down with ungovernable grief and shame
before a merely ornamental bit of femininity.

Fate had simply perpetrated another of her ghastly pleasantries!

The woman was perplexed--naturally! But it was evidently the sight of
her work, and not the work, itself, that pained her.

"Don't cut up so rough, Zeke, please don't," she wen