orcupine. "Find myself," he said, quoting her unfortunate words
with sarcasm. "What on earth do you mean by that, my good child?"

She forced back her rising tears. Had she utterly lost her rights as a
wife? He was speaking to her in the tone that a man uses to an
interfering sister. "What's to become of me?" she asked.

"Newport, of course. Why not? Fill the house up. I give you a free
hand."

"And will you join me there, Gilbert?"

"No. I'm not in the mood."

He turned on his heel and went to the other side of the summer house,
and flicked his half-smoked cigarette into the scrub below. A frog took
a leap. When he spoke again it was with his back to her. "Don't you
think you'd better rejoin Mrs. Jekyll? She may be impatient to get off."

But Alice took her courage in both hands. If this was to be the end she
must know it. Uncertainty was not to be endured any longer. All her
sleepless nights and fluctuations of hope and despair had marked her,
perhaps for life. Hers was not the easily blown away infatuation of a
debutante, the mere summer love of a young girl. It was the steady and
devoted love of a wife, ready to make sacrifices, to forgive
inconstancies, to make allowances for temporary aberrations and, when
necessary, to nurse back to sanity, without one word or look of
reproach, the husband who had slipped into delinquency. Not only her
future and his were at stake, but there were the children for whom she
prayed. They must be considered.

And so, holding back her emotion, she followed him across the pompous
summer house in which, with a shudder, she recognized a horrible
resemblance to a mausoleum, and laid her little hand upon his arm.

"Gilbert," she said, "tell me the truth. Be frank with me. Let me help
you, dear."

Poor little wife. For the third time she had said the wrong thing.
"Help"--the word angered him. Did she imagine that he was a callow
youth crossed in love?

He drew his arm away sharply. There was something too domestic in all
this to be borne with patience. Humiliating, also, he had to confess.

"When did I ever give you the right to delve into my private affairs?"
he asked, with amazing cruelty. "We're married,--isn't that enough?
I've given you everything I have except my independence. You can't ask
for more than that,--from me."

He added "from me" because the expression of pain on her pretty face
made him out to be a brute, and he was not that. He tried to hedge by
the use of